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.

The full extent of past military events can be difficult to appreciate using only historical and documentary accounts. By combining these visual and textual sources with archaeological and geoarchaeological evidence, the authors propose and test an interdisciplinary approach that aims to establish a process-oriented understanding of the genesis and transformation of conflict landscapes. Using the battle site at Vossenack Ridge in Germany as a case study, they demonstrate that such an approach can maximise our understanding of war-related transformations of the landscape, while minimising the damage to sub-surface archaeological materials.

Extensive settlement activity at the Bronze Age site of Mokarta in western Sicily has previously been inferred, but the extent and condition of its subsurface remains have never been established. The authors use geophysical prospection, historical and modern remote-sensing data and soil chemistry to identify previously undocumented structures and activity areas extending beyond those exposed by previous excavations. This exercise not only has implications for the multifaceted social organisation of Late Bronze Age communities in Sicily, but, more generally, demonstrates how minimally invasive investigative techniques combined with existing data can reveal subsurface archaeological sites and the impact of post-depositional processes.