In this article, the authors contend that three blades, archaeometrically identified as made of obsidian from the Nemrut Dağ source in eastern Anatolia, were recovered from bona fide archaeological contexts at two sites in Poland. This is supported by somewhat contentious contextual evidence, which is thoroughly reviewed. If the findspots are accepted as genuine, these artefacts would mark the furthest western distribution of Nemrut Dağ obsidian, approximately 2200 km away from the source, more than three times the previously recorded western distribution of this material. The known history of recovery and curation of these artefacts, their techno-typological features, and their raw material source (based on EDXRF analysis) are assessed, and an interpretation of this unusual material is offered.

Despite the clear divisions in current archaeological theories, in the last 30 years a ‘new consensus’ is emerging; this is the recognition that materials can actively shape human behaviour and cognition. While this recognition offers major opportunities for explaining changes in the archaeological record without just succumbing to individual simplistic models – such as migration or diffusion, or acculturation or convergence – there is still a need to formulate a framework that allows schematising this new consensus into our classifications and analyses of archaeological materials. Our paper aims to take a first step in this direction by formalising some mechanisms through which human behaviour and cognition can be modified by the material world. Operating at the interstices between theories about material engagement, cognition, and practice, three mechanisms of transformation are formalised, i.e., visual enchantment, mechanical degradation and obtrusion. As a further step to integrate these mechanisms, we stress the need to factor in human expectations, the changing states of materials and contingent situations into our schematisations and reconstructions of human–material relations.

Falerii Novi, in the heart of the ager Faliscus, offers an unrivalled opportunity to investigate the peri-urban landscape of a Roman town. The paper presents some of the results of a research project that has been looking at the entire peri-urban landscape of Falerii Novi through a multidisciplinary approach, including extensive geophysical surveys, pedestrian surveys, and targeted excavation. The paper focuses on the area to the south of the city, where a series of geomorphological and archaeological features have been newly detected. The results have revealed that despite the artificial and natural boundaries of the city (i.e., the city wall and the steep ravine of the Rio Purgatorio), the community's efforts in managing, exploiting, and occupying the peri-urban area were substantial. The paper presents the newly recorded evidence of the significant effort put into water management as one of the key factors in shaping the landscape, demonstrating how the geological composition of the territory conditioned the engineering solutions adopted. Finally, the discussion focuses on the discovery of an agricultural area, likely a mixed cultivation system relating to the production of a surplus by the inhabitants of a large suburban villa.

A reassessment of radiocarbon counting statistics in accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) at the Andre E. Lalonde National Facility revealed that the traditionally assumed Poisson distribution may not always apply. An extensive analysis of 2.5 years of 14C and 12C data was conducted on a MICADAS™ AMS. This study found that only 63% of results adhered to Poisson statistics, while 34.2% showed slight deviations, and 2.8% exhibited strong non-Poisson behavior. This finding challenges the classic assumption that radiocarbon AMS is inherently a Poisson process. This study recommends considering non-Poisson models, specifically quasi-Poisson and negative binomial models, to better account for internal error and improve the accuracy of the reported error. Integrating 12C current noise into error calculations is also suggested as it plays a significant role in measurement variability. We would like to ignite curiosity on other AMS laboratories to test the non-Poisson error framework with the broader aim of assessing its applicability in improving conventional statistical models, error expansion methods, and in ensuring more accurate and reliable 14C results.

In recent scholarship on the Ottoman Mediterranean, it has become commonplace to challenge narratives of heroic discovery and cultural superiority expounded in publications by European travellers. Rather than taking a polished, published account as its starting point, this paper discusses the travels of Edward Falkener (1814–96), a lesser-known Victorian architect and writer whose extensive tour around Anatolia (1844–5) was never communicated to a broader audience. If Falkener is remembered today, it is usually as the author of the first anglophone monograph on ancient Ephesus and editor of the first British academic journal devoted to classical art and architecture. This paper reviews Falkener’s career, but instead of these publications, the focus is on his remarkable personal archive of diaries, sketchbooks, watercolours, contracts and notes for an incomplete book about his tour of Anatolia. Drawing on this collection, it explores his fluctuating interests in heritage from different periods of Anatolia’s history and well-documented interactions with a variety of local actors who helped or hindered his meandering tour. Representing the first attempt to study Falkener’s journey, this paper explores the utility of his archive for understanding the challenges and contingencies of Victorian travel in the Ottoman Empire.

This article presents the results of archaeological research of the post-Second World War mass grave site of Jama pod Macesnovo gorico in Slovenia. The surroundings of the killing site and the mass grave have been the subject of various investigations, including the exhumation of human remains in 2022. In addition to the human remains of approximately 3450 individuals, the results of metal detector surveys, and the excavation of the grave itself have yielded thousands of artefacts associated with the victims and perpetrators, shedding light on the events of the post-Second World War period and mass murder of opponents of the communist-oriented national liberation movement and new Yugoslavian regime. The study represents the results of the most extensive exhumation of war victims’ remains in Slovenia and demonstrates the significant role of archaeology in the reconstruction of historically poorly documented events in modern conflicts.

This article concerns the economy of one of the few fortified settlements of the Late Bronze Age–Early Iron Age on the northern coast of the Black Sea, the Uch-Bash settlement, and its satellite settlement, Sakharna Holovka, in the Inkerman Valley in south-western Crimea. Archaeological excavations from the 1950s onwards have yielded much information on the cultivation of plants from the settlement, including charred grains and their impressions on pottery, tools for harvesting and processing the crops, storage containers, and other objects. Data were also obtained on the crops that were grown in the Inkerman Valley. Together, this evidence shows that the production of cereals was a major aspect of its economy at the turn of the Bronze Age to the Iron Age.

In 1937 the philosopher Robin Collingwood excavated a henge monument in Cumbria and identified the postholes of a series of timber buildings, which he compared with those at other sites. These structures at Eamont Bridge were replaced by a stone circle. He planned to continue the work for a second season, but was prevented by illness. His project was completed by the famous German scholar Gerhard Bersu, who concluded that many of the features identified two years earlier were of geological origin; others were rootholes and animal burrows. Their projects have played a part in the history of fieldwork, but in recent years influential researchers have tried to rehabilitate Collingwood’s reputation as an excavator. Their views were encouraged by his pivotal role in studies of the northern frontier of Roman Britain. In 2023 parts of the monument at King Arthur’s Round Table were re-excavated with the aim of settling the dispute. The new work supported Bersu’s interpretation, but recognised that Collingwood’s approach was not as misguided as his critics had supposed – it was directly based on his agenda for historical research. The real problem is that he had been working without sufficient experience on a difficult subsoil. This article considers the methods used by both researchers at King Arthur’s Round Table and compares their distinctive approaches to field archaeology.

This article offers a fresh interpretation of the ancient Roman relief at Palazzo Sacchetti, identifying it as a depiction of the senatorial delegation meeting Septimius Severus at Interamna in AD 193. Through iconographic analysis, it argues that the relief embodies the Senate’s expectations for Severus’ rule, grounding his image in the principle of Iustitia and portraying him as a model of moderation and fairness. Ultimately, it reveals how the relief uses a ‘historical’ depiction of a real event as a lens to examine the negotiation of power dynamics between the emperor and the Senate at the outset of Septimius Severus’ reign.

The concept of ethnicity has been largely omitted from recent interpretational models in European prehistoric archaeology. However, eagerness to avoid the problems associated with its past uses has left us with difficulties in talking about important aspects of collective identities in the past. This has become particularly clear as increasing attention has turned to understanding processes of migration and their underlying social dynamics. Here, we argue that a concept of ethnicity cast along the lines of Rogers Brubaker’s ‘ethnicity without groups’ provides us with a possibility to avoid the conceptual baggage of essentialist and static views of ethnic identities. Instead, it stresses the dynamic nature of collective identities and the social and political use of ethnicity. This is especially useful, we argue, for the study of prehistory and in periods of profound change, such as situations of migration. We use the historical Migration Period as a foil to discuss the Early Neolithic Linearbandkeramik and the third millennium B.C. Corded Ware and Bell Beaker phenomena to demonstrate how group-making and ethnicity formed and were transformed during migration processes.