Cultural landscapes affiliated with the Indigenous Sámi of the northern boreal forests are laden with cognitive elements of social and religious significance. Here, the authors focus on trees bearing incised markings and use an archaeological and ethnohistoric interpretive framework to explore the significance of such trees in Sámi landscapes. Intensive forestry is destroying culturally modified trees at an alarming rate, and their significance as the bearers of culture and history is being stripped from forest landscapes. As a step towards understanding their importance, this work makes a plea for the documentation, interpretation and protection of the remaining trees.

The ethical treatment of human remains after excavation is a core debate in archaeology. This project explores the treatment of human remains in some European museums with an aim to support open discussion of complex ethical issues among research and heritage professionals involved in the care of human remains.

Volunteers are a key part of the archaeological labour force and, with the growth of digital datasets, these citizen scientists represent a vast pool of interpretive potential; yet, concerns remain about the quality and reliability of crowd-sourced data. This article evaluates the classification of prehistoric barrows on lidar images of the central Netherlands by thousands of volunteers on the Heritage Quest project. In analysing inter-user agreement and assessing results against fieldwork at 380 locations, the authors show that the probability of an accurate barrow identification is related to volunteer consensus in image classifications. Even messy data can lead to the discovery of many previously undetected prehistoric burial mounds.

Investigations in the Tollense Valley in north-eastern Germany have provided evidence of a large and violent conflict in the thirteenth century BC. Typological analysis of arrowheads from the valley (10 flint and 54 bronze specimens) and comparison with type distributions in Central Europe, presented here for the first time, emphasise the supra-regional nature of the conflict. While the flint arrowheads are typical for the local Nordic Bronze Age, the bronze arrowheads show a mixture of local and non-local forms, adding to the growing evidence for a clash between local groups and at least one incoming group from southern Central Europe.

Despite considerable attention in the literature, existing studies analyzing the effect of left governmental power on inequalities suffer from three main limitations: a privileged focus on economic forms of inequality at the expense of political and social ones, inaccurate measurements of left governmental power, and the analyses’ narrow time spans. This article addresses such concerns through a comparative longitudinal analysis where the impact of left governmental power on different measures of political, social, and economic inequalities is investigated in 20 Western European countries across the last 150 years. Data show that, consistent with previous literature, the Left in government has significantly reduced most forms of inequalities. However, the equalizing effect of the Left in government has decreased over time and has become not significant since the 1980s. The Left is today incapable of accomplishing its historical mission of reducing inequalities. The article discusses the rationale and implications of these findings.

After St James the Apostle, Bishop Teodomiro of Iria-Flavia is the most important figure associated with the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. He supposedly discovered the apostolic tomb after a divine revelation between AD 820 and 830 yet, until the discovery, in 1955, of a tombstone inscribed with his name, his very existence was a matter of some debate. Here, the authors employ a multi-stranded analytical approach, combining osteoarchaeology, radiocarbon dating, stable isotope and ancient DNA analyses to demonstrate that human bones associated with the tombstone, in all likelihood, represent the earthly remains of Bishop Teodomiro.

Looting and plough damage to the eighth–fifth centuries BC tumulus of Creney-le-Paradis, France, hinders interpretation of this potentially significant site. Nevertheless, application of novel microtomographic techniques in combination with optical and scanning electron microscopy allows the first detailed examination of 99 textile fragments recovered from the central pit. The authors argue that the diversity of textiles revealed—at least 16 different items—and the quality of weaving involved confirm earlier interpretations of the high status of this burial, which is comparable, at least in terms of textiles and metal urns, with other ‘aristocratic’ tombs of the European Iron Age.

This article presents a longitudinal comparative analysis of the regulation of private funding to political parties in 15 West European democracies and explores how these rules have changed under the most recent wave of political finance reforms. In particular, the article questions whether a deregulation of political finance regulation may be in sight, with a downsizing of the role of the state in the political finance domain. While evidence does not support a clear movement toward deregulation, the article shows that the move from private to public subsidization may not be that irreversible as it seemed and that private funding to political parties is likely to become more prominent in the near future also in Europe.

In most accounts of peacemaking after World War I, “flawed” decisions at “Versailles” caused the ethnically mixed states of Central and Eastern Europe to descend into violent ethnic clashes, while the allegedly more homogenous Western European states faced few issues with minorities. This article challenges this simplistic view by examining the treatment of German-speaking minorities in the borderlands of Alsace-Lorraine, South Tyrol, and Eupen-Malmedy between 1918 and 1923 in the immediate post-war and the early interwar period. Building on an innovative comparative framework of five key variables, we find that, in all three cases, post-war borders generated incentives for the respective governments to suppress their new minorities, and that states used ethnic markers to target them. The strength of state institutions and liberal principles account for a reversal (Alsace-Lorraine), moderation (Eupen-Malmedy), or hardening (South Tyrol) of measures. International commitment to defend the new borders and the absence of a tradition of ethnic conflict also had a significant impact.

Clusters of Neolithic cursus monuments are attested in several parts of Britain but have so far not been recorded in Ireland, where only isolated or pairs of monuments are known. A recent lidar survey of the Baltinglass landscape of County Wicklow, Ireland, has now identified a cluster of up to five cursus monuments. Here, the author explores this group of monuments and their significance within the wider setting of Neolithic Ireland and Britain. Their unique morphology, location and orientation offer insights into the ritual and ceremonial aspects of the farming communities that inhabited the Baltinglass landscape and hint at the variability in the form and possible functions of these monuments for early farming communities.

Modern and contemporary archaeology, the French equivalent of historical archaeology, emerged in the 1970s. Subsequent attempts at theorising this sub-discipline have been hindered by a lack of broad professional recognition and funding. While the archaeology of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries is now more widely recognised in France, studies of the post-nineteenth-century period remain limited to a few specific contexts. Here, the author offers an overview for the Anglophone readers of modern and contemporary archaeology in France and argues that greater theorisation, cross-fertilisation with other archaeological traditions and a diversification of the range of themes considered might enhance recognition of this sub-discipline within and beyond France.

What are the distributional consequences of migration, and how do they affect attitudes toward migration? In this paper we leverage a natural experiment generated by the ousting of former Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi, which created an unprecedented influx of economic migrants from African countries to Europe. This surge of low-skilled labor benefited low-productivity firms by lowering their production costs and expanding their labor supply. Employing a triple difference-in-differences design, we document that attitudes toward migration became more positive in Western European regions with large shares of migrants and low-productivity firms. Evidence from Sweden, which provides finely grained geographical data, confirms these findings. We then test the economic microfoundations of this attitudinal shift. We show that the surge in the supply of low-skilled labor increased the profitability of low-productivity firms more in areas that experienced larger migration flows. We find no evidence that migration worsened natives’ labor market conditions.

Investigating the relationship between Islamic religiosity and electoral participation amongst Muslim citizens in Western Europe, this study combines insights from the sociology of religion and Islamic studies with political behavior literature thus creating an improved theoretical framework and a richer empirical understanding surrounding the electoral participation of religious minorities. First, we theorize about three underlying dimensions of Islamic religiosity: frequency of mosque attendance, religious identification, and frequency of prayer. Subsequently, we consider how the religiosity–voting relationship is bolstered or hindered by hostile national environments such as more exclusionary policies and practices (e.g., veil banning or exclusionary citizenship laws).

Empirically, we use a unique dataset that harmonizes five European surveys, resulting in a sample size of just under 8,000 European Muslims. Using multi-level techniques, we find, contrary to research on majority religiosity, that communal religiosity is unrelated to electoral participation. However, individual religiosity bolsters voting in particular among the second generation. Opposite to our expectation, we find that hostile environments do not seem to lead to different impacts of Islamic religiosity within Western Europe. Our results support the taking of a more fine-grained approach when measuring religiosity and also highlight how the impact varies across genders and generations.

Research on negative partisanship and affective polarization shows that wholesale rejections of individual parties are a common and growing phenomenon. This article offers a novel perspective on assessments of parties by considering citizens' legitimacy perceptions of political parties as institutional players. Combining research on political parties and public opinion, I develop a theoretical framework that explains how parties' characteristics shape their perception as legitimate institutional players. I argue that governing experience, age, ideology, and democratic behaviour provide informational cues to citizens about how democratically dangerous a party is. To test my argument, I fielded a cross-sectional survey in seven West European countries and a large-scale survey experiment. The results consistently show that citizens use party-level cues such as ideological moderation and democratic behaviour to form party legitimacy perceptions. The findings have important public opinion implications for political parties and their institutional role in democracies.

The presence and influence of peripheral elites in national political institutions is frequently handled by the press. But, oddly enough, the lack of a comprehensive vision of this issue tends to feed flashy titles alerting about the influence of some territorial groups in central institutions such as the “Scottish Raj,” the “Tartan mafia,” or the “Cosa Scotia” in London. This article aims to provide a general theoretical framework able to orient those fragmented researches. This literature review was led from May 2018 to June 2020. It presents those results in six sections. The ways in which peripheral elites get access to central institutions are analyzed in the first section. In the second section, we introduce the literature about the presence of peripheral elites in the state apparatus, before stressing the different networks representing the interests of peripheries in the city capitals in section three. Fourth, this article points out the various career orientations of peripheral elected officials. This leads us to question their policy influence in different fields. Lastly, a short section tackles the phobias provoked by the rise of peripheral elites occupying central political positions, before proposing a general framework for orienting future research on this topic.