We present the excavation results from a Middle Neolithic site associated with the Funnel Beaker Culture. Within two overlying house phases, a recessed area was recorded, which had been constructed using different sized pebbles. The arrangement and form of the feature clearly indicated anthropogenic origin and is understood as belonging to one of the house phases. Consequently, it is interpreted as a cellar. Several pits and post holes are additional features that were recorded at the site and indicate the presence of a fence structure with up to seven parallel courses. In this paper, we present radiocarbon dates from the features and an age model for the construction and use of the cellar as well as the fences. Moreover, the site Nygårdsvej 3 will be placed in its regional archaeological landscape.

Excavations at the site of Tell el-Retaba since 2007 have revealed an extensive settlement and associated material culture dating from the Third Intermediate Period (1070–664 BC). This work represents the only large-scale investigation into domestic archaeology from this period in Egypt and the results offer important insights into aspects of urban life for an under-studied phase of Egyptian history.

In this article, the authors present the salient archaeological results of a diachronic, interdisciplinary research project on rural settlement and land use in a region of low mountains in southern Germany. Despite clear locational disadvantages, in particular great distances to drinking water sources, archaeological excavations and an extensive dating programme document an unexpectedly long continuity of prehistoric settlement in the area.

The wealth of settlement evidence has supposed a decisive difference between prehistoric archaeology of the Mediterranean compared to that of Central Europe. This situation has changed substantially during recent years due to large scale rescue excavations carried out in central and eastern Germany. Individual houses as well as large settlement complexes have been systematically recorded and can now be dated to the Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age. The catalogue of all ground plans discovered up to 2019 in the federal states of Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt, and Thuringia has recently been published as a supplementary volume of the proceedings of the conference ‘Late Neolithic and Early Bronze Age Settlement Archaeology’, held in Halle (Saale) in October 2018. Based on the geographical distribution, shape, size, orientation, and dating of the more than 240 building ground plans, the present study examines the architecture and settlement development of the Corded Ware and Bell Beaker communities, as well as of the Únětice complex, between the rivers Saale and Elbe. This analysis offers new insight into the way of life of the first full metalworking societies of central Germany from the 3rd and first half of the 2nd millennium bce, which so far have mainly been approached through their outstanding, but numerically limited, funerary remains and hoards.

Economic directness is a new model of socioeconomic organization for the Paracas culture (800–200 BC) in southern Peru, with wider implications for economic theory of the prehispanic Andean past. Using an archaeoeconomic approach to analyze settlement patterns, obsidian artifacts, malacological material, and camelid skeletal remains, this study reconstructs the Paracas economy by using primary archaeological data from the northern Nasca Drainage. Its results force reconsideration of existing socioeconomic models for the ancient Andes such as verticality, circuit mobility, llama caravan mobility, transhumance, and market concepts. Whereas components typical of these models are often absent in the case of the Paracas economy, our new proposal of economic directness integrates their relevant aspects. Economic directness is defined essentially by direct access to important resources from diverse ecological tiers, direct and down-the-line exchanges, reduced transaction costs, llama caravan transport, unbalanced commodity flows across the western Andes, and forces of supply and demand with major consumption on the coast. These features formed under conditions of population growth, generating a continuous and dense settlement pattern from the Pacific coast to the highland puna zone.

This article proposes that *Magas, capital city of the North Caucasian Kingdom of Alania, can be identified with the gorodishche (hillfort) of Il'ichevsk, in Krasnodar Krai in the modern Russian Federation. The Kingdom of Alania was the most powerful polity in the North Caucasus in the tenth and eleventh centuries; however, the location of its capital has never been satisfactorily established. This article reviews the evidence of written sources on *Magas – notably Masʿūdī, Juvayni, Rashid al-Din, and the Yuan-Shi – and identifies four criteria which can be used to identify the site of *Magas. These are its occupation between the tenth and thirteenth centuries; the influence of the Alan kings over it; its massive fortifications; and its capture by the Mongols in 1239–40. All of these features can be identified at Il'ichevsk, in contrast to previously proposed sites of *Magas.

This article presents the background to and prospects for a new initiative in archaeological field survey and database integration. The Roman Hinterland Project combines data from the Tiber Valley Project, Roman Suburbium Project, and the Pontine Region Project into a single database, which the authors believe to be one of the most complete repositories of data for the hinterland of a major ancient metropolis, covering nearly 2000 years of history. The logic of combining these databases in the context of studying the Roman landscape is explained and illustrated with analyses that show their capacity to contribute to major debates in Roman economy, demography, and the longue durée of the human condition in a globalizing world.

The Early and Middle Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin is often viewed as a long period of transition from a dispersed form of land occupation to one of increasing aggregation, ultimately resulting in the formation of tell settlements and large cemeteries. This developmental trajectory remains a legacy of early 20th century archaeology, where the similarity of material culture recovered from cemeteries and settlements was used to develop a multi-linear scheme of progression of regional chronologies tied to specific archaeological cultures. While typologically conclusive, the recent increase in the availability of radiocarbon determinations suggests that these sequences represent a priori interpretation of social development rather than empirically verified observations. In order to do so, it is necessary to re-evaluate the existing dataset in order to determine whether the formation of tells was a chronologically contemporary development and whether the regional chronological sequences are supported by independent dating.

The rising popularity of hobbyist metal detecting has provided early medieval scholars with various important new datasets, not least the concentrations of metalwork commonly known as ‘productive sites’. Awareness of these foci derives almost exclusively from archaeological evidence, yet they continue to be interpreted through a documentary lens, and are frequently labelled ‘monasteries’. Using the recently discovered site of Little Carlton, Lincolnshire, as a case study, it is argued that comprehension of metal-rich sites is significantly furthered by turning to archaeologically-orientated research agendas and terminologies. As a consequence, seventh- to ninth-century Little Carlton can be understood as one element of a high-status ‘meshwork’ within early medieval East Lindsey, in which elite power was articulated in the landscape through a number of contemporary centres. On site, archaeology indicates the presence of occupation, burial and craft working, but shows that highly symbolic indigenous practices were taking place too, including intentional deposition into a naturally-occurring pond. Evidence for activity either side of the seventh to ninth centuries also stresses the importance of long-term trajectories in shaping the character of places previously celebrated for their finds-rich phases alone.

With the exception of Circum-Alpine wetland sites, structural remains of fourth-millennium BC settlements in Central Europe are rarely encountered. As a result, there is a dearth of information concerning settlement organisation and social differentiation. Recent excavations at the waterlogged Parkhaus Opéra site on the shores of Lake Zurich have, however, provided important new evidence for the existence of complex Late Neolithic settlement strategies and social stratification. Excellent organic preservation conditions permit extensive dendrochronological analyses of structures and the precise phasing of building activity. The results reveal a complex and highly dynamic settlement system, and provide a rare insight into the organisation of Late Neolithic Central European society.

The settlement record of the Neolithic of the northern Alpine foreland is used to address the question of what difference having high-resolution chronology — in this case principally provided by dendrochronology — makes to the kinds of narrative we seek to write about the Neolithic. In a search for detailed histories, three kinds of scale are examined. The longer-term development of cultural patterns and boundaries is found to correlate very imprecisely with the character and architecture of settlements. Individual houses and settlements were generally short-lived, suggesting considerable fluidity in social relations at the local level. Greater continuity can be found in the landscape, perhaps involving more than individual communities. We argue that the particular history of the northern Alpine foreland is best understood by interweaving multiple temporal scales, an approach that will need to be extended to other case studies.