Archaeology in Sudan and Nubia has been greatly impacted by modern colonialism in northeast Africa. In theory and practice, the discipline's history in the region includes interpretations of past realities that worked as intellectual bases for colonization. From a postcolonial standpoint, Sudan and Nubia offer us an opportunity to investigate complexity in the past beyond oversimplifying colonial narratives entangled with the practice of modern archaeology in the region. However, more complex, postcolonial interpretations of the ancient past have played only a small part in ‘decolonizing’ initiatives aiming to reframe archaeological practice and heritage in Sudan and Nubia today. In this paper, I discuss the different trajectories of postcolonial and decolonial theory in archaeology, focusing on Sudan and Nubia (roughly the region south of Egypt from Aswan and north of Sudan up to Khartoum). I will argue that bridging postcolonial and decolonial theory through what I will refer to as ‘narratives of reparation’ can offer us ways to address both conceptual problems underlying theory and practice and avenues for an all-encompassing decolonization of the field.

Excavations at Knossos have uncovered faunal and archaeobotanical archives spanning the Neolithic and Bronze Age (7th–2nd millennia bce), during which one of Europe’s earliest known farming settlements developed into its first major urban settlement and centre of one of its oldest regional states. Through stable isotope (δ13C, δ15N) analysis of seeds and bones (as evidence for the growing conditions of cereal and pulse crops and for the types of forage consumed by livestock), land use and, ultimately, political economy are explored. Changing husbandry conditions overwrite any effects of long-term aridification. Early (7th–6th millennium bce) Knossian farmers grew intensively managed cereals and pulses (probably in rotation) that were closely integrated (as manured sources of forage) with livestock. Through the later Neolithic and Bronze Age, settlement growth accompanied more extensive cultivation (eventually with cereals and pulses not in rotation) and greater use of rough graze and, by goats, browse. Pasture on cultivated land remained central, however, to the maintenance of sheep, cattle, and pigs. Variable diet of early sheep suggests management at the household level, while thereafter progressive dietary divergence of sheep and goats implies their separate herding. Until the Old Palace phase (early 2nd millennium bce), urban growth was matched by increasingly extensive and probably distant cultivation and herding but somewhat more intensive conditions during the New and Final Palace phases (mid-2nd millennium bce) perhaps reflect greater reliance on surplus from prime land of previously rival centres that now came under Knossian control.

Lisa French (1931–2021) was the first woman to be appointed as Director of the British School at Athens, from 1989–1994. Most of her adult life and career were devoted to the site of Mycenae, where she excavated with her father, Professor Alan Wace, in the 1950s and after his death in 1957 with Lord William Taylour. Thereafter, she continued studying and publishing the results of the excavations and studying and publishing on Mycenae and Mycenaean material culture more generally for the rest of her life. In 2013 she donated the Mycenae archive, containing records of all the British excavations at Mycenae, to the Faculty of Classics at Cambridge. She married David French in 1959, by whom she had two daughters. Her marriage led to her combining her work at Mycenae with playing an important part in French's excavations and, after he became Director of the British Institute of Archaeology at Ankara, in effect taking responsibility for running the Institute from 1968 until 1976. The organisational experience this gave her proved invaluable when, after their divorce, she took up the wardenship of Ashburne Hall at Manchester University and later still when she became Director of the British School at Athens. Lisa was best known for her work on the Mycenaean terracotta figurines, which were originally the subject of her PhD thesis at University College London, and on the stratigraphically based chronology and typology of Mycenaean ceramic production, particularly that of Late Helladic III. Over the years, she successfully initiated successive generations of students of Mycenaean archaeology into the mysteries of its pottery.

Ancient DNA studies have identified western Scotland as the only known region in Britain where inter-breeding occurred between early 4th millennium bc Neolithic migrants and the indigenous Mesolithic population. By drawing on excavations at Mesolithic and Neolithic sites on the Isle of Islay, I identify a period of population overlap and suggest three scenarios for Mesolithic–Neolithic interaction: swift succession, dual population, and biocultural merger. These scenarios are evaluated against the archaeological evidence from Islay and elsewhere in western Scotland, and with reference to patterns of Mesolithic–Neolithic interaction in continental Europe. A cautious preference is expressed for biocultural merger, occurring between the mid-4th and mid-3rd millennia bc, a period that could be termed the ‘Neomesolithic’.

Mandra, on the uninhabited islet of Despotiko in the middle of the Aegean Sea, is well known to the archaeological community, owing to the discovery there in 2001 of an extensive sanctuary of Apollo. Twenty-two edifices have come to light so far, and the systematic excavation continues to elucidate the long history of the site. The Early Iron Age marked the earliest activity there, traces of which offer fertile grounds for reconsidering life in the Cyclades at the time. The richest evidence for this period is offered by a secondary deposition, detected near two Early Iron Age buildings, which revealed thousands of clay sherds, extending from the late ninth/early eighth to the late sixth century BC, quantities of animal bones, and more than 60 metal objects. This article focuses on a small group of Early Iron Age terracotta animal figurines from this deposition. Critically analysing both their association with ritual and the polarity of ritual and profane, an attempt is made to unravel the lifecycle of these figurines, treating them as agents of activity. Their function and meaning are interwoven with the activities operating at the site during the Early Iron Age, at least two centuries before the foundation of the Archaic temenos.

Radiocarbon (14C) dating has, since its inception, become an integral part of disciplines such as geology and archaeology, underpinning many key findings made by researchers in the past seven decades. As 14C dating develops, the need arises to revisit older findings and legacy data which may well contain laboratory errors or post-analysis misinterpretations. In this paper we examine one such finding from Sweden, namely the 1958 14C dating of the great Jordfallet (“the Earthfall”) landslide, which was published in the very first volume of Radiocarbon in 1959. We further trace how the results of this 14C dating were misunderstood in a time prior to modern radiocarbon calibration, and the impact which this mistake has had throughout academic publications, state reports and local heritage literature through the course of over sixty years. Because of this flawed interpretation the credible date of 1249 AD given to the landslide by historical sources has been overlooked. Instead, a series of dates from the mid-12th and early 13th centuries have been attributed to the landslide event based on erroneous radiocarbon analysis, a mistake which has substantial implications for the understanding of both regional and international history in medieval Scandinavia.