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The first chapter investigates Alexandria, the city that welcomed most Europeans and Americans upon their first arrival in Egypt. Alexandria was then, as it is now, largely ignored by visitors. Archaeologists and tourists alike usually stayed for just one night while waiting for the train to Cairo, and many left the city out of their stories. From 1885 until the end of the period covered by the book, we see that some tourists extended their stay in Alexandria for two or three days before moving south, to Cairo. This was due to the development of Greco-Roman archaeology. The first chapter briefly traces the development of Greco-Roman archaeology in Alexandria and how those discoveries impacted travel in that city. Chapter 1 is more a history of archaeological tourism than of hotels as central sites. This discussion is included because Alexandria, a city that welcomed countless travellers to Egypt, was an important space that is so often ignored.
The emergence of social complexity is at the heart of archaeological inquiry, but to date, there has been insufficient global comparative analysis of this phenomenon. This volume offers archaeologists and other social scientists reconstructions of past societies in all parts of the world, some of which challenge currently popular accounts. Using recently developed analytical approaches robust enough to yield compatible results from disparate datasets, the reconstructions presented here rest on fresh comparative analysis of archaeological data from 57 regions. They reveal the highly varied pathways to social complexity in ways that make it possible to see previously conflicting ideas as complementary. The analytical approaches and the full datasets are presented in detail in the book as well as an online data base. Offering new insights into the forces that have shaped human societies for millennia, this study provides a deeper understanding of the ways in which archaeology uses the material remains of past societies to reconstruct how they were organized.
Assessing the physical integrity of archaeological sites is vital for heritage conservation management. Using the example of Arslantepe, a prehistoric tell site in south-eastern Türkiye, this article demonstrates the application of RUSLE modelling to estimate surface erosion vulnerability, employing ultra-high-resolution photogrammetry and a field-based geoarchaeological framework. The results reveal contained erosion across the site with localised degradation limited to steep trench walls and spoil heaps, indicating remarkably good site conservation and consolidating the effectiveness of RUSLE modelling as a scalable method for evaluating surface processes and informing conservation strategies on individual archaeological sites.
Traditionally, classical multivariate statistical methods have been applied to relate cultural materials recovered at archaeological sites to their respective raw material sources. However, when reviewing published research, which usually claims to have reached a high degree of confidence in the assignment of materials, the authors have detected that those applying these methods can make serious errors that compromise the inferences made. This Element reconsiders the use of statistical methods to address the problem of provenance analysis of archaeological materials using a step-by-step procedure that allows the recognition of natural groups in the data, thus obtaining better quality classifications while avoiding the problems of total or partial overlaps in the chemical groups (common in biplots). To evaluate the methods proposed here, the challenge of group search in ceramic materials is addressed using algorithms derived from model-based clustering. For cases with partial data labeling, a semi-supervised algorithm is applied to obsidian samples.
Sovereign Heritage Crime: Security, Autocracy, and the Material Past explores why autocracies intentionally exacerbate anxieties associated with an aggrieved ethnoterritorial minority's tangible heritage. Since discriminatory domestic campaigns of state-sponsored erasure are political choices, this theoretical study proposes to understand them as sovereign heritage crimes. This framework predicts that heritage securitisation - constructing disquieting material memories into ontological threats - enables legitimacy-deficient yet affluent autocracies to pursue 'performance legitimacy' by delivering a real or imagined 'permanent security'. Since this state crime is both enabled and exposed by traditional and emerging technologies, the study also explores their dual use for human rights and wrongs. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.
Excavations at Kalat-e Yavar offer new insights into prehistoric connectivity between the Iranian Plateau and Central Asia. Stratified deposits yielded ceramics and burials from the third/second millennia BCE, alongside architectural remains, pits, faunal/botanical assemblages and a kiln, marking the Bojnord Plain as a cultural contact zone.
Long-lived trees support biodiversity at multiple scales, maintain ecosystem functionality, serve as natural archives, and hold cultural and aesthetic value. Despite their importance, the maximum longevity of many tree species remains poorly understood, limiting the design of effective conservation strategies. Challenges in obtaining reliable tree ages are commonly represented by natural wood decay, sampling obstacles, and indistinct or absent annual rings, which prevent or limit the application of tree-ring analyses (dendrochronology). Radiocarbon dating, increasingly accessible and applicable to all species, provides a flexible approach to study tree longevity and its ecological implications. For tropical trees, which mostly lack annual rings, radiocarbon dating is one of the few reliable methods to determine tree ages. Even in sections of the calibration curve characterized by oscillations and plateaus, statistical methods such as wiggle-matching or deposition models may be used to reduce the range of probable tree ages. In this paper, we illustrate a mismatch between tree-ring and radiocarbon-derived estimates of the longevity of angiosperm trees, with tree-ring maximum ages often half of those obtained through radiocarbon dating. We also present the most up-to-date estimates of maximum longevity for 42 arboreal angiosperm species worldwide, based on a literature review. Radiocarbon results indicate that ages of 400–500 years are a common feature of many broadleaved species, while exceptional old ages are restricted to a small minority of individual trees. Our results underscore the need for increased efforts to locate old and ancient trees, investigate their role in ecosystem ecology and ensure their protection.
The WEAR project is developing integrative methods to analyse and predict use-related shape transformation of Neolithic stone tools from Central Europe through experimental archaeology and computational modelling.
Se presentan los detalles del rescate de una tumba parcialmente saqueada, localizada al pie del Jasi Hablador —un gran paredón de areniscas terciarias, ubicado al norte del Departamento de Belén, Catamarca, Argentina—, y los primeros avances en el análisis de los materiales recuperados. Fue posible rescatar más de 30 fragmentos de textiles, abundantes restos óseos humanos —algunos con tejidos blandos— y distintos materiales arqueobotánicos secos. Una datación radiocarbónica sobre una muestra textil arrojó una fecha para mediados del siglo quince dC, coincidente con la ocupación inka en la región. A partir de estos primeros resultados, se discute la relación de este espacio funerario con el paisaje del Jasi Hablador en el contexto más amplio de la conquista inka. La preservación de los materiales orgánicos en el sitio es excepcional para la región, por lo cual, la continuidad de estos estudios aportará información de gran relevancia sobre los vínculos entre los grupos locales y el imperio inka.
Heritage branding and heirloom cultures are twin strategies for building brands in global markets. In this Element, the authors analyze these strategies through skyr; a traditional, sour dairy from Iceland. They explore how live microbial cultures in skyr have been 'heritagized' as heirloom cultures to build a brand advantage. Live skyr cultures, they show, illustrate symbiotic relations over millennia between microbial cultures and human cultures. The industrialization of this species interaction in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, they argue, ultimately converted a mutualistic relation into a parasitic one. Moreover, they demonstrate a parallel inversion of gender relations in the production and consumption of skyr as part of its industrialization and export. Ironically, these transformations undermine the industry's promotion of the cultures and heritage to which it has effectively put an end. They ask whether there is a more general lesson in this about the relationship between industrialization, capitalism, and heritage.
“Labor” as a specific domain of embodied experience and a source of imagery and figurative language in early China remains understudied. The study invites critical attention to this topic, focusing on four types of imagery of labor—plowing, weaving, fishing, and hunting—which constituted an interpenetrated rhetorical body sustaining varying socio-political and intellectual agendas. Either foregrounded with expressive rhetorical figures like metaphor and allegory or sedimented in commonplace language, the four types of labor imagery emerged and proliferated to present a constellation of moral, epistemic, and aesthetic values toward the characterization of specific practices of ruling, learning, speaking, and writing, as well as the intellectual agency thereof. This rhetorical phenomenon emerged in pre-imperial China and gained new prominence during Han times. Especially since the first century bce, the four tropes of labor were made particularly useful to characterize a growing body of intellectual labor, which was increasingly engaged and coupled with literary learning and production in a manner of self-oriented accumulation and manifestation. This change worked in concert with a forcefully emerging and proliferating literary culture, as well as its embedded scholarly aesthetics and ideology.
This article examines the sociopolitical evolution of Palenque and the Mensäbäk Basin, focusing on shifting models of organization from the Late Preclassic (300 BC–AD 250) to the Late Postclassic (AD 1250–1525). We argue that changes in access to ritual spaces and landscape-related ceremonies reflected broader transformations in Maya social organization as it made the transition from collective to less collective societies. The transformation from Preclassic to Postclassic occupations in the Mensäbäk Basin provides visible evidence of political and ideological shifts. Findings from Mensäbäk highlight the diversity of governance structures, showing that exclusionary and communal models varied based on spatial and temporal contexts.
This digital review examines how feminist data science can inform, challenge, and reshape archaeological knowledge production in an era of expanding digital data infrastructures. Beginning with a historical analysis of the term “feminist” in American Antiquity, I demonstrate that although feminist perspectives have appeared consistently over four decades, such engagement remains limited in scope. Drawing from this context, I argue that the proliferation of online, publicly accessible archaeological datasets requires renewed feminist and decolonial scrutiny. I situate these challenges within broader conversations around FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, and Reusable) and CARE (Collective benefit, Authority to control, Responsibility, and Ethics) principles, Indigenous data sovereignty, and moderated openness, highlighting tensions between expanding digital access and resisting colonial datafication. Intersectional feminist data science, particularly the framework proposed by D’Ignazio and Klein (2020), offers actionable principles for confronting inequities embedded within archaeological data structures. I illustrate these principles through a multimodal collaborative project with the Pueblo of Zuni and the Hopi Tribe, which uses film-based storytelling to reframe relationships to ancestral collections and places. The article concludes with a reflection on citation inequities and disciplinary gatekeeping, underscoring how digital data practices can either reproduce or dismantle structural biases. I argue that transforming archaeological data science requires collective courage and sustained commitment to feminist, Indigenous, and community-engaged approaches that expand the inclusivity and ethical integrity of our field.