Three late medieval inventories of the chapel surrounding the shrine of St Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey, London, record the presence of a number of books and pamphlets among the relics and liturgical paraphernalia. This article discusses these books, their significance and the reason for their maintenance at the shrine, and offers possible identifications with several surviving manuscripts.

This article explores the Maroon landscape of the Caribbean island of Dominica (Wai'tukubuli) by creating a geographic information system (GIS) model to determine the reasons behind settlement location choices. For more than 50 years, hundreds of self-emancipated Africans inhabited the mountainous interior of Dominica, where they formed various communities that actively resisted European colonialism and slavery not only to maintain their freedom but to assist in liberating enslaved Africans throughout the island. Contemporary Dominican communities maintain connections to these revolutionary ancestors through the landscape and continuing cultural practices. None of the Maroon encampments, however, have been studied archaeologically. This study uses geospatial methods to understand the visibility, defensibility, and spatial accessibility of nine Maroon camps. The results of the viewshed and least cost path analysis allows us to map Dominican Maroon social networks and reimagine the possible routes that the Maroons took to maintain their freedom.

This article stems from the encounter of ancestral stories and archaeological knowledge for Africans in Amazonia. Against colonial fragmentation and anti-Blackness, these theoretical reflections are rooted in Black Archaeology as a praxis of redress. The continuing struggles of ancestral and contemporary Black Amazonian communities, who insist on anti-colonial modes of existence, connect with the need to indigenize the archaeological mode of knowledge through otherwise world-senses as ontoepistemological references. These questions emerged during the first steps of the ongoing collaborative archaeological project Pitit'Latè. The founding story of Mana, an Amazonian village built in 1836 by the hands, heads, spirits, and technologies of more than 400 West Africans captured in the illegal transatlantic trade, serves as the epistemological bones of this research about Black Amazonian territorialities and materialities that remain erased in dominant colonial discourses.

Le pratiche funerarie delle élites tardoantiche a Roma rivelano un intreccio complesso tra status sociale e privilegio esibito nella sepoltura. Mentre i pregiudizi storiografici tradizionali hanno appiattito la forte eterogeneità interna alla classe dirigente dell'Impero tardoantico, un'analisi focalizzata sulle tombe riferibili ad individui specifici svela un quadro sfaccettato e permette di negarne definitivamente qualsivoglia concezione monolitica. L'epigrafia fornisce indicatori affidabili nella delineazione dello status sociale dei defunti, con formule riservate ai membri degli ordini senatorio ed equestre sulle cui tombe si concentra l'analisi proposta. Il mausoleo del celebre Sextus Claudius Petronius Probus incarna la grandiosità associata alle sepolture d’élite, mostrando tutti i caratteri di monumentalità tipici del periodo. Allo stesso modo, il mausoleo di Viventius, ex prefetto di Roma, riflette gli stretti legami tra gli aristocratici e i nuovi poli di attrazione cristiani del suburbio romano, possibilmente facilitati dal patrocinio diretto della Chiesa. Nel contempo, le catacombe rivelano pratiche di sepoltura diverse, con alcuni individui appartenenti ai due ordini maggiori della società romana sepolti in ambienti modesti, insieme a comuni defunti. Questi esempi sottolineano l'intricata relazione tra gerarchia sociale, costumi funerari e affiliazioni religiose tipici di Roma tardoantica.

L'articolo si propone di presentare lo storico dell'arte paleocristiana e bizantina tedesco Wolfgang Fritz Volbach (1892–1988) come museologo, alla luce di alcune ricerche recenti, di nuove acquisizioni documentarie e di una più ampia rassegna della sua attività tra Magonza, Berlino e Roma. Il testo si concentra sul suo periodo romano (e in particolare vaticano), sia in qualità di precoce professore di museologia al Pontificio Istituto di Archeologia Cristiana di Roma, sia come attivo collaboratore nella riorganizzazione del Museo Sacro della Biblioteca Vaticana. Si riflette poi anche sulle sue idee di museologo, attingendo ai suoi testi critici e ai musei in cui ha lavorato tra Berlino e Magonza.

The 2022 bicentennial of the arrival of Black Americans to West African shores was a moment of reflection for many Liberians. In the wake of civil war, many questioned the celebratory tone of the occasion and challenged settler heritage narratives. At the same time, Providence Island featured prominently in official programming. Since 2019, our Back-to-Africa Heritage and Archaeology project has worked on the island to investigate the site's function beyond the mythic 1822 encounter between those seeking freedom from racial injustice in the Americas and Indigenous West Africans, instead offering a more inclusive and complex account of the public heritage space. We specifically focus on deposits that date to the decades prior to, during, and after 1822, demonstrating the tensions surrounding freedom-making and Black Republicanism from past to present, concluding that the binary of pre- and post-settlement fails to capture the complexities of Liberian pasts that unfolded on the island.

In response to Bentley and O'Brien's (2024) article, I wish to focus on a specific aspect of cultural inheritance—that of technological innovation in later prehistory. In essence, I agree that “inherited social practices and knowledge” (2024: 1407) are indeed the backbone of technological transmission. Many examples can be cited where technological expertise (potting, metalworking, etc.) is passed down within a family or through apprenticeship schemes. For example, the first Ming Emperor of China (Hongwu, reigned AD 1368–1398) initiated in 1381 a census (the ‘Yellow Book’) in which households were classified for taxation purposes into one of four categories: general, military families, artisans and salt-producers. Artisans were classified by trade and the implication is that the family trade was fixed and inherited (Huang 1974: 32). This system continued until at least the end of the Ming dynasty (AD 1644).