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).

In order to better characterise carbonaceous components in atmospheric aerosols and to assess the contributions of fossil carbon (FC) and non-fossil carbon (NFC) sources and their seasonality in the Eastern Mediterranean, we collected fine (PM1.3) aerosols at a remote marine background site, the Finokalia Research Station, Crete, Greece, over a period of one-year. PM1.3 samples were analysed for elemental carbon (EC), organic carbon (OC), water-soluble OC (WSOC), and stable carbon isotope ratio (δ13CTC) and radiocarbon content (14CTC) (pMC) of total carbon (TC). All the parameters, i.e., PM1.3, δ13CTC and 14CTC showed a clear temporal pattern with higher values in summer and lower values in autumn. The 14CTC ranged from 54.7 to 99.1 pMC with an average of 74.5 pMC during the entire year. The FC content in TC (FCTC) was found to be slightly lower in winter and almost stable in other seasons, whereas the NFC contents (NFCTC) showed a clear seasonality with the highest level in summer followed by spring and the lowest level in winter. Based on these results together with the seasonal distributions of organic tracers, we found that biomass burning (BB) and soil dust are two major sources of the fine aerosols in winter. Although biogenic emissions of VOCs followed by subsequent secondary oxidation processes are significant in summer followed by spring and autumn, pollen is a significant contributor to TC in spring. This study showed that emissions from fossil fuel combustion are significant (25.5%) but minor compared to NFC sources in the eastern Mediterranean.

We appreciate the respondents’ comments on our debate article ‘Cultural evolution as inheritance, not intentions’ (Bentley & O'Brien 2024). We all agree that traditional cultural practices—such as manufacturing Acheulean handaxes—often take considerable amounts of time to learn; as Gladwell (2008) popularly proposed, it takes 10 000 hours of practice to make an expert. We also appear to agree that cultural practices are intergenerational. As Frieman (2024: 1421) notes, ideas and practices persist because they are “valued, recreated, manipulated, instrumentalised and enacted generation after generation”; and as Ingold (2024: 1417) puts it, traditional tasks “are not subject to the free will of the individual but fall upon practitioners as part of their responsibilities” to their communities. Drawing on the practice of Bronze Age metallurgy, Pollard (2024) asks the million-dollar questions: how does innovation occur, and what causes it? As both Prentiss (2024) and Pollard note, for example, the pace of technological change is often punctuated, an observation common across the natural and social sciences, but one that defies easy explanation (e.g. Duran-Nebreda et al. 2024; O'Brien et al. 2024).