This article explores the history of St Catherine’s chapel at the abbey of Savigny, head of Normandy’s only monastic congregation. Built in the twelfth century, the chapel was, at the time of its demolition in 1705, the oldest remaining part of the medieval monastic complex. It therefore appears fairly regularly in the written record and has attracted not an insignificant amount of attention as a result. That said, the near total destruction after 1789 of Savigny’s buildings, and the often contradictory nature of those written sources by which antiquarians and academics have attempted, in the absence of sustained archaeological work, to reconstruct their medieval layout, mean that a great deal remains uncertain. St Catherine’s is no exception to this rule. Its precise location and design have to date been matters of conjecture, while a great deal of what has been written about it is either inaccurate or inconsistent (or both). This article brings together for the first time all the available references to (and scholarly discussions of) the building. It combines the findings of recent archaeological work with a reassessment of the written sources to argue that the chapel’s location within Savigny’s monastic precinct was almost unique in the Cistercian world, with its closest parallels being found instead in the Cluniac one. These circumstances were born more of accident than design, but they nevertheless presented challenges for Savigny’s medieval community, the consequences of which help shed light on wider issues relating to the use and reuse of Cistercian monastic spaces.

Digital heritage and archaeology in practice comprises two companion volumes: Presentation, teaching, and engagement (from here on, PTE) and Data, ethics, and professionalism (DEP). The chapters present some of the outputs of the Institute for Digital Archaeology Method and Practice, based at Michigan State University and funded by the National Endowment for Humanities Institutes for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities programme.

In the summer of 2019, members of the CARTography Project set out to re-create the route that Patrick and Joan Leigh Fermor took during their first visit to the Deep Mani in 1951. The project involved meticulously analysing the couple's notebooks and photographs to glean details about where they had ventured, using least-cost analysis to model their potential routes and ground-truthing the results by walking and boating the routes ourselves. As in much of rural Greece, Mani's topography has changed substantially in the seven decades since the Leigh Fermors’ journey, with paved roads having replaced many of the Ottoman-era footpaths that locals once relied on for travel and transportation. While the transformed landscape we encountered prevented a complete re-enactment of the Leigh Fermors’ journey, it also offered an opportunity to embody key parts of their travelling experience. The results of our study are twofold: first, a detailed map of the route the Leigh Fermors followed based on our reading of their documentary sources; and second, an assessment of the utility of using least-cost analysis to model the routes of historical travellers.

This article charts the collection history of the only surviving precolumbian cotton reliquary (cemí) from the Dominican Republic, establishing its provenance from the mid-nineteenth century through a previously unpublished manuscript written by the collector, Rodolfo Domingo Cambiaso Sosa, and using archival documents in Italy. The cemí, found in a cave in the southwest of the country near the town of Petitrou (Enriquillo), was purchased in 1882 by Admiral Giuseppe Giovanni Battista Cambiaso, one of the founders of the Dominican Navy. It emerged in international publications commemorating the quadricentennial of the Spanish–Indigenous encounter in 1892 and shortly thereafter was sent to Genoa, Italy. It entered the collections of Turin's Royal Museum of Antiquities in 1928 before being passed to the newly established Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography. It was rediscovered by Dominican scholars in the 1970s and has inspired numerous investigations since, including renewed collaborative links between the Dominican Republic and Italy.

Los modos de vida marítimos que caracterizaron a los archipiélagos occidentales de Patagonia comenzaron su desarrollo a mediados del Holoceno medio. El registro arqueológico sugiere posibles orígenes tanto en el extremo sur como en el extremo norte del territorio insular. La propuesta de un núcleo ecotonal septentrional de maritización se fundamentó en el hallazgo de sitios con tempranas ocupaciones de especialización litoral, entre los que destacó el conchal de Puente Quilo-1. Este artículo presenta resultados de nuevas excavaciones realizadas con el objeto de precisar su cronología, historia ocupacional y relevancia en la comprensión del proceso de maritización y colonización de los archipiélagos. A través de su integración con investigaciones previas en el sitio, los nuevos datos muestran una secuencia de reocupación estrechamente ligada a cambios en el paisaje producto de la variación en los niveles marinos, y caracterizan un campamento con diversidad funcional y diferenciación de áreas de actividad, inserto en un contexto de expansión regional de grupos cazadores-recolectores marinos. Los atributos culturales y su cronología permiten robustecer la hipótesis de un núcleo de maritización en el norte de la franja archipelágica.

Archaeologists have an obligation to conduct research that is relevant and responsive to the desires, interests, values, and concerns of Indigenous descendant communities. Current best practices for collaborative, community-based archaeologies emphasize long-term engagement and “full collaboration,” including the coproduction of knowledge and total stakeholder involvement. The present-day structures and demands of archaeology—especially in CRM and graduate student research contexts—can serve to make such fully collaborative work difficult, if not impossible. Oftentimes, these difficulties result in a complete abdication of collaboration or even consultation beyond the bare minimum required by law. However, professional archaeologists must strive in all instances to work alongside Native communities in respectful, responsive, and mutually beneficial ways even if this work may often fall short of the loftiest ideal. In this article, the authors present two case studies in collaboration from recent projects conducted in the North American midcontinent. These case studies clearly demonstrate how tribal fieldwork monitoring, working with tribal institutional review boards (IRBs), and other related forms of “imperfect” collaboration can still help move us toward a more ethical, inclusive, and respectful future archaeology.

Most population estimates for Maya sites are for the Late Classic period, a time of peak population in the Central Maya Lowlands. At Naachtun, Guatemala, a major city during the Early Classic that continued into the Late Classic period, researchers recently carried out an ambitious program of test pitting in residential areas; its aim was to model the growth of residential units during the entire Classic period and so better contextualize the rise of Classic Maya dynasties and the scale of their economic and political power. This article presents an improvement to the existing method for estimating population for periods preceding the population apex (in this case, the Early Classic period): it not only estimates the occupancy rate of residential units occupied pre-apex but also assesses their size, using a typology I developed based on their morphology and pattern of transformation.

In 2001, five French public organizations (CNRS, CEA, IRD, IRSN, and the Ministère de la Culture) signed an agreement to purchase a new accelerator mass spectrometer to provide radiocarbon dating services at the national level. The Laboratoire de Mesure du Carbone 14 (LMC14) was set up in Saclay (France) around ARTEMIS, an AMS system based on a 3MV Pelletron from NEC and installed in early 2003. In 2015, the LMC14 joined the Laboratoire des Sciences du Climat et de l’Environnement, making it possible to develop research projects in addition to the service activity and since 2021, the LMC14 has been a member of the IAEA Collaborating Centre “Atoms for Heritage” at the Université Paris-Saclay. Since 2003, 70,000 samples have been measured. Two-thirds of the samples have been prepared on site and one-third in two associated laboratories in Paris and Lyon. Over the past years, the LMC14 has participated in several international inter-comparisons and has continuously improved its capabilities by developing new protocols for preparation and measurement. In this paper, the radiocarbon dating services of the last 20 years for research institutions, museums and environmental monitoring are reviewed and recent results from environmental and archaeological research programs are highlighted.