Cultural heritage preservation and protection are increasingly tethered to an international security agenda constituted across multilateral agencies. UNESCO and other organizations have securitized heritage, engaging in military training and peacekeeping, international law and prosecution, and cultural property protection. Following the events in Iraq and Syria, UN Security Council resolutions have instantiated norms of heritage violence, risk, and threat, while the Global War on Terror also interpolated looting, trafficking, and terror financing into a heritage-protection agenda. We compare these developments with our large-scale public opinion survey of Mosul and Aleppo residents’ experiences of heritage violence and the implications for security and reconstruction. While our results display potential overlaps with UNSC concerns, we suggest that site destruction and broader security concerns are understood differently on the ground, shaped by political and economic factors. We argue for a more humanitarian focus if any relationship between heritage, security, and, indeed, peacebuilding is to be forged.

Ever since Alexander Thom visited Calanais in the Outer Hebrides, groups of Neolithic monuments in western Scotland have been studied in relation to the land and the sky. Less attention has been paid to their close relationship with the sea. These places were secluded and could be difficult or dangerous to reach, yet details of their architecture suggest that there were close links between them. How important were long distance connections between 3000 and 2000 bc? Were some ceremonial centres visited by boat? And was the journey itself treated as a rite of passage? The case extends to structures in Orkney and Ireland.

In Iberia, ditched enclosures appeared during the Copper Age (late fourth to third millennium bc). These sites are linked by their circular organization, communal labour investment, and complex temporality, but vary markedly in their distribution, function, and scale. Though archaeological attention has focused on ‘mega-sites’, an assessment of small-scale enclosures in marginal environments is key to understanding the social dynamics that facilitated their emergence. Here, the authors present results from Los Melgarejos (Getafe, Spain), the first Iberian Chalcolithic enclosure (3 ha) to be extensively documented, with all structures and seven per cent of the enclosure ditches excavated. Bioarchaeology, mortuary archaeology, isotope analyses (δ13Cco, δ13Cap, δ15N), and radiocarbon dating are employed to compare lived experiences of diet, stress, trauma, and funerary ritual at small- and large-scale enclosures. Comparisons with the mega-site of Marroquíes reveal similarities in lived experience and ritual practice, as well as regional differences in dietary isotopes, highlighting the utility of multiscalar comparisons for understanding prehistoric lifeways.

Research in Roman interior design and wall painting has undergone two major shifts in the past century. The first, in the 1980s, steered away from the tradition of purely art historical studies that had elucidated the basic principles of artistic developments, iconographies, and pictorial programs. Instead, researchers focused on the Roman house as a social space, with private and public zones inhabited by individuals of different social standing. The second shift, occurring in the new millennium, saw researchers returning to the decoration of the house; however, they were now more intrigued by the cognition and reception of the paintings and how they were conceived to create atmospheres, mnemonic paths, and impressions on their viewers. Simultaneously, important insights into the often-multifunctional use of space were provided by finds analysis.