This paper explores the dynamics of power and legitimacy between the late Roman Empire and the societies beyond its northern and eastern frontiers, arguing that shared understandings of political authority, developed through centuries of interaction, facilitated the establishment of post-Roman kingdoms. Unlike the more formalized relationships with client kingdoms along the empire’s eastern and north African frontiers, interactions along the northern and eastern European borders were more fluid. The paper posits that gift-giving, particularly of imperial brooches and gold medallions, was central to establishing political relationships between the Roman emperor and rulers beyond the frontier. These gifts created networks of obligation, with recipients potentially owing peace, tribute, or military service. A newly identified imperial brooch from Ureki in Georgia suggests a wider geographical reach of these networks. However, by the fifth century, rulers beyond the frontier began to imitate Roman symbols of power, commissioning their own versions from local craftworkers. By doing so, they cut themselves loose from earlier ties of obligation. The paper concludes that this long history of interaction and mimesis of Roman power structures enabled populations beyond the Roman frontier to understand and ultimately emulate Roman imperial power.

This study explores the reception and adaptation of Roman and Roman-inspired materials in South Asia and Southeast Asia during the early historic period. Drawing on a database of over 300 objects, it compares materials such as glass vessels, beads, engraved gems, and coin adaptations. While South Asia shows greater diversity and quantity of Roman imports, Southeast Asia demonstrates selective appropriation and creative transformation, often filtered through South Asia, particularly peninsular India. Southeast Asia favoured high-quality imports and innovative hybrid adaptations blending Mediterranean and Indic elements. In contrast, South Asian adaptations tended either to evoke Roman originals more closely using easily accessible raw materials such as in the case of terracotta bullae, or, when made from more valuable raw materials, often to diverge more substantially from the Roman prototypes. This pattern is further complicated by the emergence of Sri Lanka as a key crossroads in Indian Ocean networks after the fourth century ce. The study highlights regional differences in integrating Roman materials, revealing unique cultural priorities and engagement with global trade networks.

Stylistic variation has been a central concern in the study of prehistoric pottery in central Europe. In this paper, we approach stylistic variation from a visual cognition perspective, focusing on the effects that stylistic attributes of vessels have on patterns of attention. A free-viewing eye-tracking experiment was conducted using pottery vessels from central Germany spanning from 5500 to 1 bce. Our results show that, among modern observers, decorative patterns and motifs primarily guide visual attention over attributes like shape or luminance. Attentional patterns were associated with variation in decorations: vessels with spiralled or punctured motifs (Early–Middle Neolithic) tended to attract more attention, whereas the undecorated (Younger Neolithic), less decorated, burnished or linear motifs (Bronze Age), or standardized and symmetrical patterns (Late Iron Age) of later styles, were less visually engaging. Considering the archaeological context of pottery stylistic changes in central Germany, a provisional explanation is that increased standardization and specialization and the general displacement of interest towards other crafts reduced the importance of pottery for visually communicating important socio-cultural cues, producing fewer captivating designs. This study does not claim equivalence between modern and past populations, but demonstrates the potential of eye-tracking techniques for investigating visual-cognitive responses to stylistic change.

This article discusses the accessibility of sensory experience in archaeological research by proposing an approach that articulates the role imagination plays in the investigation of empirical data from the distant past. Building on interdisciplinary work in sensory studies, this article argues that sensory experiences are both culturally constructed and biologically mediated, emphasizing how the dynamic interplay between perception and materiality reveals the values embedded in ancient sensory-based desires. The author concludes by applying the theoretical and methodological approaches discussed throughout to a case study on ancient Egyptian head cones, demonstrating how archaeology can uncover the complex and consequential nature of ancient sensory experience. Sensory archaeology may advance not only by developing new ways to answer questions, but by reconsidering how we ask them.

This paper explores the importance and implications of a multivocal and ethnographic approach to archaeological praxis and interpretation of artefacts. Drawing from post-colonial and archaeological disenfranchisement perspectives, an attempt has been made to review the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI) and other agencies’ strategies and their resultant hegemonic dominance over archaeological sites and narratives, thus marginalizing local and indigenous narratives and knowledge systems. Focusing on certain Jain heritage sites of Purulia, biased conservation and preservation strategies have been observed along with the collection of neighbouring local community narratives which revealed a sense of apathy towards archaeological authorities along with a sense of pride towards the material revealing the disenfranchisement of material heritage. The paper thus explicates the importance of the inclusion of multivocality and ethnographic methodologies into the archaeological praxis, allowing for the inclusion of minority narratives and recognizing the importance of multiple ontologies and epistemes.

This study presents an analysis of funerary practices at the site of Valdelasilla (Illescas, Toledo, Spain). The methodology integrates the morphological study of burial structures, anthropological analyses, a consideration of grave goods and the radiocarbon dating of human bone. The chronological data indicate funerary activity at the site from the Late Neolithic to the Chalcolithic period. Bayesian modelling confirms the establishment of a planned cemetery by the end of the fifth millennium cal. bc, featuring small burial chambers organized around a larger tomb enclosed by a ditch. The burial chambers, which were constructed from wood, clay and small stones, created distinct spaces for the deceased. This embryonic form of monumentalization, the funerary practices observed and the early chronology link Valdelasilla to other peninsular cemeteries associated with the emergence of megalithism, now identified for the first time on the plateau. The location of the necropolis offers new insights into the role of inland regions in the emergence of Iberian and European megalithism.

In this paper, we reconsider the relationship between continuity and change in archaeology by arguing that material continuities do not necessarily imply conservatism or resistance to change but function as precondition for transformation. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of thought as a ‘play of forms’, we conceptualize architecture as an active medium of sense-making, through which societies reframe novelty within familiar epistemic traditions. We examine two case studies: proliferation of compound coresidential enclosures (CCE) in the Central Andes and adoption of the vihara in Angkorian Cambodia. Though often interpreted as ruptures or external impositions, both forms drew upon existing religious and political traditions, making new social projects legible. Over time, these architectures reorganized social relations and became central to emerging formations: Andean ayllus and Khmer Theravada Buddhism. By reframing continuity as a resource for sense-making rather than conservatism, we argue that transformation emerges through creative reworking of tradition, situating thought-in-action at the core of historical change.

Archaeological zoontologies have tended to focus on animals with whom people of the past were regularly entangled, either in their everyday lives as companion and work animals or at least seasonally as favoured prey. In contrast, I focus on an archaeological case study representing a more ‘eventful’ form of human–animal relations: encounters between Indigenous peoples and manatees (Trichechus manatus latirostis) in precolonial Florida, USA. I review archaeological evidence that manatees were uncommon in precolonial Florida, probably only occasionally migrating north from the warmer waters of the Caribbean, thus limiting encounters with people to as little as one or two every few hundred years. I then consider both the potential transformative and stabilizing effects of such infrequent encounters for precolonial Native Americans and—to the extent possible—for manatees. Haraway famously emphasized that ‘becoming is always becoming with’, but for people and manatees in precolonial Florida, becoming may have been becoming with or without.

Biological determinism continues to shape how kinship is defined, from research to repatriation proceedings. This privileging of biological relatedness reflects and reinforces dominant ‘Western’ frameworks of kinship, often sidelining culturally-specific, Indigenous, and community-centered understandings of family and social belonging. Advances in archaeogenomic technologies today offer unprecedented insight into past human societies, and these advances have the potential to forge new, multivocal, and inclusive approaches to kinship. However, the application of ancient DNA risks reproducing power imbalances and epistemic hierarchies when genetic connections are assumed to be the primary or sole measure of social ties. This paper examines the conceptual and ethical implications of privileging DNA as a measure of kinship, emphasizing how such practices can obscure complex social realities, undermine self-determination, and reify narrow and essentialist understandings of identity. We call for critical reflection about the agents and motivations of archaeogenomics research, on the role of genetics in defining relationships and urge that multiple knowledge systems be considered in studies of kinship, both past and present.

In this commentary, I approach ‘kinship trouble’ as a cultural and medical anthropologist with two decades of ethnographic and collaborative engagement with genetics, and as someone deeply committed to and interested in interdisciplinary collaboration. From this perspective, the collection’s significance is its focus on the emergent encounter between two very different fields—new kinship studies and palaeogenetics—both of which intersect with archaeology. Combining the intellectual explosion of new kinship studies with the data explosion of palaeogenetics is an enticing premise. What can happen, kinship trouble asks us, if the creativity that characterizes the new kinship studies could be married with the rich new layers of genomic information that have sedimented archaeological scholarship? And what could be lost if this opportunity is squandered? The contributions to this collection read archaeological and palaeogenetic evidence against the grain to reveal active kin-making practices that often disrupt presentist, ethnocentric and heterosexist assumptions. These vibrant interpretations of relatedness provide many ‘carrots’ to entice anthropologists, archaeologists and palaeogeneticists to become ‘oddkin’ and to ‘lean in’ to kinship trouble.