The Iron Age shipwrecks of Agde K (Brescou Island, France) and Cabrera B (Balearic Islands), discovered in the 1960s, together yielded seven lead ingots cast in the large shells of Pinna nobilis molluscs. Lead isotope analysis later traced the ingots to lead sources in south-eastern Iberia. These ingots are reassessed here as evidence for the integration of coastal production strategies in Iron Age south-eastern Iberia, revealing material connections between metallurgy and coastal industries linked to the exploitation of Pinna nobilis, such as sea silk manufacture. This compelling example of reuse of materials from one industry in another attests to a circular economic activity that is likely to have had practical and environmental motivations. The author aims to promote the recognition of Pinna nobilis shell casting and similar reuse phenomena elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin.

Smelling and other sensations that are often considered solely physiological phenomena are in fact deeply influenced by culture and history, and without understanding the ancient sensory landscape, our knowledge of the past inevitably remains limited. This paper explores the olfactory nuisances in one Pompeian city block (IX,3) and its immediate neighbors. I examine the area's stenches by tracing and mapping the sources of smells, focusing on those that in previous scholarship have been considered to render ancient towns foul smelling. The analysis contests the views of malodorous Roman urban space presented in previous studies and suggests that the smellscape of urban Pompeii was not a constant reek but milder and manageable. However, the analysis also reveals that social hierarchies and power relations played a part in Pompeian odor control, and the olfactory landscape was not the same for all inhabitants.

This article briefly outlines underwater cultural heritage artifact management in Australia from an unregulated collecting environment in the 1940s–1960s to the increasingly regulated environment of the present. In 1993, in conjunction with new legislation, an amnesty was declared in order to inventory artifacts collected from now-protected historic shipwrecks that were in private hands. The amnesty period concluded with approximately 20,000 artifacts notified at a time when information was being stored in a range of formats and to different standards. Today, the Australian Government manages the possession, custody, and control of approximately 500,000 underwater cultural heritage artifacts, most of which are in collecting institutions, with one-tenth in public custody. This article highlights the contemporary legislative, policy, and administrative framework for the management of underwater cultural heritage artifacts in Australia, particularly those that remain in the possession of private individuals and are subject to trade.

Se presenta un análisis detallado de tres queros con las escenas “El Inca y la Coya” y “Guerra de los incas contra los chunchus o antis”. Cada pieza es individualizada mediante sutiles diferencias tanto en las escenas figurativas como en las bandas de signos tocapus. Esta característica es propia de los queros con escenas complejas y bandas de tocapus de más de seis signos. Llegamos a la conclusión de que el encargo al artesano/artista comprendía ciertos requisitos, que podemos denominar mensajes semánticos asociados directamente al futuro propietario de los objetos. En el caso de la escena “El Inca y la Coya” muy probablemente se trataba, en primer lugar, de hacer referencia a los verdaderos (o supuestos) ilustres ancestros del propietario del vaso. En el caso de la escena “Guerra de los incas contra los chunchus o antis” se trataba, muy probablemente, de resaltar una gesta sobresaliente del ancestro, algo que se conocía de la tradición oral inca. Resulta que el lenguaje visual andino expresado en los queros manifiesta una complejidad y una precisión en los mensajes trasmitidos por esta vía mucho mayor de lo que se solía pensar.

The Beaker phenomenon in Britain is typically represented by a particular form of pottery and its inclusion in graves with flexed or crouched inhumations referred to as Beaker burials. Analysis of the full range of burial evidence, however, reveals a high degree of variability in funerary rites including cremation and skeletal disarticulation. Summed probability distribution analysis of radiocarbon dates provides evidence for continuity of these other, atypical rites from the pre-Beaker Late Neolithic (c. 3000–2450 cal bc) through the Chalcolithic (c. 2450–2200 cal bc) and into the Early Bronze Age (after c. 2200 cal bc). Regional diversity is apparent in Beaker period funerary treatments and grave good provision between these typical and atypical rites, as is differential selection of rites on the basis of age and biological sex. This evidence for within and between community funerary diversity has implications for understanding the large-scale processes of cultural and genomic transformation across this period of major transition in British prehistory.

The Iron-Age Eurasian nomads created and circulated elaborate metalworks embellished with images of entwined, abbreviated, or contorted zoomorphic anatomies. This approach to zoomorphism has entered scholarly discourse under the blanket name “animal style,” a term often used to describe a vast corpus of zoomorphic images associated with the arts of steppe pastoralists. Numerous Warring States burials across the Ordos Loop indicate the transmission and adaptation of steppe-inspired zoomorphism into the funerary cultures of China's northern zone (beifang diqu 北方地區) and the Eastern Steppe more broadly. In the Han dynasty, animal-style images seem to have been transmitted even more widely, reaching China's southern periphery at the Kingdom of Nanyue 南越 and Lelang 樂浪 in the northern Korean peninsula. The Xianbei hegemony in the post-Han period marked a new trajectory for these designs, which reached Kofun Japan in the fifth century. Thus, the original trans-steppe visual formula underwent significant regional and local translations on a material and conceptual level to fit already established Chinese design strategies, techniques, and conceptions of animality. In this essay, I explore the regional alterations applied to the “supra” animal-style visuality in the Chinese northern periphery and other regions of Chinese political influence in North and Central Asia. In so doing, I seek to understand the swift entry of nomadic visual tropes, namely a specific “pars-pro-toto” device, into the visual vocabulary of early Chinese craftsmen from the Eastern Zhou to the Northern dynasties.

This article proposes that oral performance could be a philosophical activity in early China. The focus is on the Huainanzi, a densely rhymed philosophical treatise compiled by Liu An in the second century b.c.e. I show that the tome contains various sound-correlated poetic forms that are intended not only to enable textual performance but also, by means of aural mimesis, to encourage the intuitive understanding of its philosophical messages. Thus scholars of ancient poetry, philosophy, or intellectual history, despite being habituated to reading silently and observing disciplinary boundaries, should be attentive to these sonic patterns in order to do justice to the poetic-cum-philosophical richness and originality of this text. More importantly, I argue that these poetic forms enable readers and audiences to experience, embody, and, above all, enact the Way through textual performance. Thanks to the sound patterns of the Huainanzi, the somatic processes of aural reading and philosophical praxis can occur simultaneously. Vocalization becomes an actionable and repeatable spiritual exercise, which facilitates the intuitive understanding and internalization of philosophical values. In other words, the perennial knowing–doing gap is heroically closed by the Huainanzi.

In this article, the ways in which hobby metal detectorists searching for protected objects in the ploughsoil and archaeologists in Norway have collaborated and communicated throughout the public history of metal detecting in the country is outlined and problematized. Due to the opinions of individual archaeologists working in key positions and the autonomy of the country's local and regional management institutions, there are huge variations in both attitudes and practices toward metal detecting and its practitioners. In some areas, metal detectorists are allowed to search more or less freely, whereas in others, entire fields are protected after a few finds, making continued detecting without formal approval from the authorities illegal. Because of this, and the extreme difference in the activity level of individual detectorists, the number of recorded detecting finds varies immensely across county and regional borders. I suggest that channels for collaboration and communication be formalized and that a national and therefore uniform public reporting system be realized—given that it is, for the time being, largely up to individual archaeologists whether some of the country's most active citizen scientists are equally treated by the archaeological heritage management system in Norway.

This article considers the relevance of the Society for American Archaeology's 2018 “Statement on Collaboration with Responsible and Responsive Stewards of the Past” for imported antiquities (specifically, “classical” ones—that is, from Mediterranean regions). Various practical, legal, and ethical differences between collecting imported versus domestic objects make it difficult to identify “responsive and responsible stewards” of the former. An obstacle to responsible stewardship of privately owned classical collections—and to collaboration between classical archaeologists and collectors—is the 2008 acquisition guidelines issued by the two leading professional organizations in the museum field. I argue that the best home for unprovenienced and poorly provenienced antiquities collections is in university museums, where their complicated object biographies can be fully researched, taught, and displayed.

Through our research at Bahía Yendegaia on the Beagle Channel in southernmost Patagonia—the ancestral territory of the Yagán people—we discovered the first rock art site on Tierra del Fuego Island. The geometric visual images found at Yendegaia Rockshelter present motifs and compositions analogous to those recorded at other sites on the southern archipelago associated with the marine hunter-gatherer tradition. They also show graphic similarities to the rock art paintings attributed to terrestrial hunter-gatherer populations from the Pali Aike volcanic field, located on the north side of the Strait of Magellan in mainland Patagonia. Both, however, display quantitative differences, which suggest that they emerged from different visual traditions but from the same field of graphic solutions. Navigational technology enabled the canoe-faring Fuegian people to have long-distance mobility and to maintain a flow of social information mediated via visual imagery expressed in material forms, such as rock art and expressions of portable art. Ethnohistoric reports suggest a cooperative social interaction more than a competitive one. This cooperative social dynamic would have been necessary for the survival of marine societies in the harsh environmental conditions characteristic of the southern part of south Patagonia.

Although the legal conditions are perceived as restrictive, metal detecting has become a popular activity in the Czech Republic. In 2017, a questionnaire survey revealed that a significant segment of this community is made up of passionate people interested in history and archaeology. The majority of professional archaeologists consider metal-detecting finds to be important and believe that cooperation with metal detectorists is necessary, beneficial, and acceptable. A collaborative project called “Joint Forces in Order to Discover the Common Archaeological Heritage of the South Moravian Region” aims to create conditions for citizen science among the metal detectorists in the region. By using tools such as expert workshops for the employees of professional institutions, meetings, educational workshops and field activities with interested members of the public, and production and distribution of printed and digital information materials, the partners in the program have long endeavored to improve the mutual understanding of all relevant actors of society and administration. The creation of circles of citizen collaborators is in progress in several archaeological institutions; nevertheless, this process is far from over. In 2020, with the creation of the Portal of Amateur Collaborators, this activity acquired a unified digital scheme for the registration of finds.

During the excavations of the team of the University of Chieti in the area of Ain Hofra, in the East necropolis of Cyrene, several interesting sculptures were found in tombs A and C, also called the Tomb of the Sarcophagi and the Tomb of the Sculptures. In this paper a specific find from Tomb A is presented, as it is a rare example of a Mithraic relief from a private funerary context. The find has only previously been published for the translation and presentation of the inscription; however, an analysis and interpretation of the relief together with the inscription has never been tackled. The very fragmentary lid is made of white marble, presenting a very lively iconographic sequence of Mithraic schemata, in combination with a metrical inscription within a central tabula ansata. The find context is particularly monumental and is characterized by two Temple Tombs built in ashlar masonry located on the plateau of Ain Hofra overlooking the wadi (canyon) and the fertile terraces below. This multidisciplinary article looks at the iconographic elements, the epigraphic implications and the monumental context of the Mithraic reliefs.