With this paper, we aim to bring the history of the rural landscapes and communities of the ancient (‘Classical’) Mediterranean back into the limelight, drawing attention to their contributions to and pivotal roles within the multifaceted structural transformations of the Mediterranean in the first millennium bce. To do so, we focus on two case studies from one particular region that looms large amongst those heavily exploited by ancient colonial powers: the island of Sardinia. In chronological terms, our focus is on the so-called Punic and Roman periods, roughly spanning between the fifth century bce and the fifth century ce. Long overlooked, if not outright dismissed, in conventional accounts of the ancient Mediterranean, the rural communities of Punic-Roman Sardinia were not only vital economic producers, but also formed large and culturally distinct social groups. They actively maintained their own traditions, ways of living and practices in the face of the ruling classes’ disruptive initiatives. Their actions to shape their identity and history resonate closely with the theory of the ‘history of subaltern groups’ formulated in Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks, particularly Notebook 25. We draw upon a semiotic understanding of Gramsci’s notion of subalternity to strengthen archaeology’s ability to foreground the materiality of those communities unaccounted for by history. Our goal is to discuss comparatively the material signs of rural life of Punic and Roman-period Sardinia, to outline an alternative decolonial perspective on the island and to consider its implications for the wider ancient Mediterranean.

How might the affective work of politics be accessed through the fragments of material culture that we recover as archaeologists? This paper considers how political identities can be formed and shaped affectively through engagement with the qualities of craft objects and the connected world of experience that they index. Taking up a case study from nineteenth-century highland Madagascar, I explore how political affects are caught up with the making and using of everyday things and how the transposed qualities of objects and the metonymic connections they evoke offer a means to tie changes in material culture to shifts in political affects over time.

Fossils and more recent remains of dead organisms serve as natural archives of Earth’s recent and ancient history. It is often the case that small or fragmented specimens, especially microvertebrate bones, go unstudied. Accurate identification of such remains to a specific taxonomic level can help address a wide range of questions spanning paleontology, paleoecology, zooarchaeology, ecology, conservation science, forensics, and biogeography. Geometric morphometrics demonstrates significant potential for identifying fragmented lizard fossils to at least the family level based on shape differentiation. Our proof-of-concept study using lizard maxillae of extant species within the Pacific Northwest, USA, accurately identified fragmented maxillae with as few as six comparative specimens per genus. These findings establish a framework for addressing taxonomic challenges in fragmented bone specimen identification for taxa whose curated comparative specimens are small in number and unequal in representation.

This article examines women’s storytelling and nanga (harp) performances in nineteenth- and twentiethcentury western Uganda to investigate how these songs shaped community identity and norms. Drawing on musical recordings, archival sources, and interviews, this article demonstrates that these performances functioned as important public histories, teaching audiences about past famines, droughts, climate change, and cattle events. These narratives both chronicled regional histories and provided the shared intellectual material from which community norms and a shared identity could be articulated. Extant scholarship has focused overwhelmingly on how male intellectuals contributed to ideas of race, nation, or ethnicity. This article thus provides an important alternative by showing how women produced histories that contributed to group identity—yet this historical production occurred through musical performances rather than in books, tracts, or petitions. In doing so, this article reintegrates western Ugandan women into narratives of imperial encounters and intellectual history.

The Dengjue Si 等覺寺 (Dengjue Temple) may be regarded as the most significant Buddhist temple in the Menghua region of Yunnan Province during the Ming Dynasty (1368–1644). The building dates back to the Nanzhao Kingdom (738–902), underwent significant expansion during the Ming Dynasty, and housed the Menghua prefectural Buddhist registry in both the Ming and Qing (1644–1912) periods. The article analyses an important inscription—Chongxiu Dengjue si beiji 重修等覺寺碑記 (Stele of the restoration of the Dengjue Temple)—which meticulously records the historical context of the temple’s construction and restoration, the individuals involved, its architectural layout, and its rise and fall during the early to mid Ming Dynasty. What distinguishes this case is Menghua’s unique status as the reputed birthplace of the Nanzhao royal lineage. The Ming Dynasty conquered Yunnan in 1382, after which it introduced new Confucian ideologies and Buddhist practices, and gradually initiated a programme of social reconstruction. The Zuo family, who claimed descent from the Nanzhao royal family to legitimise and consolidate their authority as native officials (tusi 土司) in Menghua, became the temple’s principal benefactors. Within this context, the restoration of the Dengjue Temple was the result of collaborative efforts among the Ming government, local officials, regional elites, and monastic leaders. By tracing the temple’s history with reference to the roles of these actors, this study presents the Dengjue Temple as a microcosm of Ming frontier governance, religious adaptation, and cultural negotiation.

This article recovers the history of the first systematic British attempts to survey the languages of India. Long before George Abraham Grierson proposed his monumental survey of Indian languages at the end of the nineteenth century, the Scottish judge James Mackintosh suggested a similar undertaking to the Literary Society of Bombay in 1806. This article follows those who pursued the project over the next several years. Their efforts stretched across India, the north-west frontier into Afghanistan, east into Burma, as far north as Nepal, and all the way south into Ceylon. Almost all of those involved in these efforts were Scots who were educated at the University of Edinburgh and so, as well as reconstructing a forgotten chapter in the history of British imperialism, this article supplements our pictures of the histories of imperial knowledge production and Scottish orientalism.