Over the past few decades, understandings of cuisine in the Maya area have been radically amplified with the use of new techniques. Some methods offer the opportunity to directly connect artifacts and features with plant foods. The recovery of microscopic food residues from sediments, artifacts, and human teeth has revealed not only a broad list of ingredients but a wide array of practices and recipes. Here, we draw on our previous paleoethnobotanical research across the Maya Lowlands to develop an understanding of Classic-period cuisines, integrating new evidence from the Southern Lowlands.

We consider the emergence of elite foodways and how elite gastronomic practices factored into broader political maneuvers and private performances. We also tentatively suggest a taxonomy of local traditions that did not conform to a strict elite “grammar.” By addressing commonalities and departures from a core and canonic elite cuisine, we highlight how local elite expressions reified culinary norms but also manifested fluidity and flexibility in culinary practice. Paralleling work with other types of elite artifact assemblages, we illuminate how privileged actors drew on broader cultural logics to make their cuisines intelligible, yet also locally improvised in significant ways.

This article presents an analysis of two sheet gold ornaments of the Mycenaean post-palatial period (twelfth–eleventh centuries bc) found in two cemeteries on the island of Kefalonia. These unusual ornaments bear solar symbols of Nordic and central European type, the closest parallels being those on the contemporary gold discs from votive deposits on the Italian peninsula. The study considers the technological, morphological, and iconographic particularities of the Kefalonian ornaments and how they differ from each other and from other finds. The ornaments’ use in a funerary context is examined against Aegean practices, burial rites, and ideology. The examination of their iconographic and conceptual antecedents in the Aegean cultural sphere reveals that the exogenous input in their creation—linked to transcultural exchange within the Adriatic—was matched by indigenous engagement with aspects of cosmology.

We combine mathematical modeling, population growth data, archaeological survey data, and GIS analysis to project that tens of thousands of archaeological sites will be destroyed by development in Illinois by the year 2100. Climate-driven migration from less hospitable areas of the United States is likely to contribute to the growth and expansion of existing municipalities, converting millions of hectares of natural and agricultural land into urban land. A scenario of 1% annual growth over the next 80 years will impact about 55,000 sites in the state, most of which are undocumented. The damage is likely to be even more severe in other areas of the world as the global trends of population increase and urbanization accelerate the expansion of large urban areas in archaeologically rich regions.

English is the lingua franca not only for academia but also for almost all international infrastructures and global communications. It comes as no surprise, then, that the dominant and assumed normative voice in archaeology is standard British English (SBE) for narratives of various times and places. This language is ‘majoritarian’—by this we do not mean that it is spoken by most of humanity, but that it is the imposed ‘ideal’ others are measured against, and that is an issue. Categories, terms and ways of interpretation are all done from a privileged majoritarian position. These do not translate and are certainly not applicable in all the different places where archaeology takes place. This paper is the culmination of conversations that occurred during a Theoretical Archaeology Group conference session in 2023, with contributing authors having adapted their talks into a discussion format to keep the conversation on challenging language representation active within the discipline.

The Portland Vase, housed in the British Museum, is the most important surviving example of “cameo glass,” datable to the early years of the Roman Empire. Until 1909, there was no doubt regarding the provenance of the vase. It was said to have come from the sarcophagus with scenes from the story of Achilles discovered in 1582 inside a large burial mound, the so-called Monte del Grano, which still stands at the fourth mile of the via Tusculana. However, in 1909, Henry Stuart Jones ruled out this provenance. The re-examination of the monument, which should be identified as the tomb of Alexander Severus, shows that the report of the provenance of the vase from the Monte del Grano sarcophagus is authentic. Similar conclusions can be reached from a re-examination of the vase itself, which suggests the two myths it depicts should be identified as the wedding of Peleus and Thetis and the afterlife of Achilles.

Archaeology prides itself on its ability to see beyond the urban elite. The countryside, the urban poor, gender and even children have all gradually come under the discipline’s gaze. The elderly, however, have failed to attract much scholarly attention. The few groundbreaking studies that tackled the issue scrutinized mortuary data and examined the ‘body’ of the elderly, but hardly any archaeological attention was given to the social aspects of the daily life of the old. Using one of the most detailed archaeological case studies available, and with the aid of ancient texts and ethnography, this article seeks to identify the ‘elderly’ and ‘elders’ in Iron Age Israel and, using Building 101 at Tel ʿEton as a test case, it places the fathers and mothers and their activities within the household.

This paper analyzes a specific genre of colonial Maya literature: the prophecies found in the so-called Books of Chilam Balam, written in the Maya language during the colonial period. These texts predict events related to 20-year periods known as k’atun. A comparative examination of these prophecies reveals that while some are of clear Maya origin, others gradually incorporate Christian concepts and even direct references to Catholic texts. I propose a typology of three distinct kinds of prophecies: traditional, transitional Christianized, and overtly Christianized. This classification is supported by linguistic and structural analysis, including the presence of loanwords, shifts in grammatical constructions, changes in prophetic structure, and the semantic transformation of key terms. Traditional Maya prophecies primarily express concerns with good governance by local rulers; in contrast, Christianized prophecies reinterpret similar passages to foretell the authority of a universal Christian God. Rather than approaching these texts from a purely historical or philological perspective, this study adopts an anthropological–linguistic lens. It considers the prophecies as literary and ideological efforts by Maya authors and scribes to reframe their pre-Hispanic past and make sense of their transformed world under colonial rule.

En este texto realizamos una revisión del espacio ritual de dos celebraciones que tienen una historia profunda entre los pueblos indígenas de Mesoamérica, la ceremonia ritual de los Voladores y el Juego de Pelota. A partir de la indagación en evidencias arqueológicas, históricas y de la experiencia de la ritualidad, exponemos los principios comunes en la diversidad de estas celebraciones rituales. Consideramos la perspectiva de los practicantes contemporáneos para incluir su conocimiento sensitivo a la discusión, esto es, un punto de vista emic que complementa el abordaje etic de los principales aspectos documentados de estos rituales. Proponemos que, como opuestos complementarios, ambos rituales constituyeron un medio para que sus practicantes lograran transitar entre los niveles del cosmos. El ritual de los Voladores es metáfora y experiencia de acceder a los niveles superiores, mientras que el Juego de Pelota lo es de acceder a los niveles inferiores. Estas celebraciones requieren del sacrificio y de un estado latente de muerte que demanda de sus practicantes una rigurosa preparación y conocimiento de las normas rituales. Concluimos observando que, a pesar de las profundas trasformaciones históricas, la pervivencia de estas celebraciones expresa los esquemas organizativos de las cosmovisiones mesoamericanas, manifiestas en la experiencia de los complejos y elaborados programas rituales indígenas.

This article examines the tabular presentations in Sima Qian’s Shi ji and Gu Donggao’s Chunqiu dashi biao through the lens of a siege in 630 bce. Recognized as exemplary historical tables of the Spring and Autumn Period, the two tables process historical narratives at both micro and macro levels in an unprecedented manner, aiming to provide a larger picture of general historical trends. By emphasizing a visual and spatial representation of history in its tabular design, the Shi ji table invites the reader to examine the text nonlinearly and to construct a dialectical relationship between it and related narrative chapters. On the other hand, Gu’s text-oriented tables, usually misunderstood as a mere continuation of those in the Shi ji, require a linear reading and cannot directly produce a visual representation of the general patterns of the Spring and Autumn Period. However, to compensate for the lack of a visual overview, Gu composed “impromptu poems” (kouhao), which orally sketch general historical trends, to help beginners memorize the history of the Spring and Autumn Period. This article aims to demonstrate the use of tabulation at the crucial beginning point of Chinese historiography and its reinvention in the late imperial period.