Forgetting, an attendant to culture change, is the stuff of history. When cultural innovations, exchange and adoption occur, previous customs, knowledge, technology and other dimensions of culture are often lost—they are forgotten. This paper considers the phenomenon of forgetting and its permutations—the passive forgetting that is more or less an accepted outcome of change, the unintentional forgetting that is accidental and undesired, and the intentional forgetting of wilful erasure—as a way of contemplating agency and culture loss/change among the Dorset Paleo-Inuit peoples of the central and eastern North American Arctic, and more broadly, in Arctic archaeology.

This paper asks how an ontological perspective on Late Nordic Bronze Age art can advance archaeological interpretation of the ornamentation on personal objects used and carried directly on human bodies. To this end, the theoretical concepts perspectivism and ontological alterity are operationalized as an alternative to epistemological approaches to art. This entails framing the art on personal objects as a set of relations with the capacity to act and affect the lives of the humans interacting with it, rather than as representations. A central point is that this art should be considered as cosmology rather than representations of cosmology. The relational effects of this art in its bodily context are presented in examples illustrating how cosmology was encountered and experienced through the use of the objects. The paper concludes that art functioned as a medium for dialogue between the metaphysical and physical realities as it made cosmology present via personal objects.

Many archaeologists recognize a need for a more proactive archaeology, one that is responsive to the goals of communities and so one that carries the potential to advance restorative justice and reclamation. But this work requires shifts in time and resources. Such high-investment community archaeology comes with unfolding developments, or cascade effects. We frame positive ones as including finding, honoring, elevating, and protecting cultural heritage and suggest these may offer those grappling with accommodating such shifts practical examples of the benefits. Our example comes from the Great Bay Archaeological Survey (GBAS) focused on colonial New Hampshire’s Great Bay Estuary/P8bagok (ca. AD 1600–1780). With years of community engagement in place, a landowner had heard of GBAS and stopped development when he noticed large stones. Here, we found an early colonial homestead site, the Meserve Garrison, and our attendant research traced out a trajectory of colonial expansion from Indigenous homelands transformed into English property, property into intergenerational wealth. With rising wealth came the dispossession of labor; GBAS found enslaved (freed) Africans lived in this rural northern New England frontier, a place not typically associated with chattel slavery. We are working to protect the site and publicly commemorate and restore an accurate, inclusive, colonial history.

Isotopes of strontium, oxygen, and carbon were analyzed in human tooth enamel from two Postclassic sites in the central Peten lakes region, Guatemala, to examine patterns of mobility and diet during a time of social unrest. Excavations at both sites, Ixlu and Zacpeten, have revealed evidence for purposeful dismemberment and interment of individuals. This study examines a possible shrine surrounded by rows of skulls at Ixlu, and a mass grave of comingled individuals interred at Zacpeten. The interments coincide with a period of conflict and warfare between two dominant polities, Itza and Kowoj. The 14 sampled individuals at Ixlu were young males, six of whom isotopically match the Maya Mountains of central Belize/southeastern Peten. At Zacpeten, isotopic signatures of adults and children (n = 68) suggested that many were either local or came from other parts of the Maya lowlands, but not the Maya Mountains. In the Late Postclassic, the Zacpeten individuals were exhumed, defiled, and deposited in a mass grave, probably by Kowojs. Although temporally and geographically related, the Ixlu and Zacpeten burials represent two distinct cases of ritual violence that reflect the tumultuous political landscape of the Postclassic period.

2026 sees the centenary of the publication of Mill Stephenson’s List of Monumental Brasses in the British Isles, a work that is still the sole complete inventory of all British monumental brasses. Stephenson was a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of London, and it was the Society’s own collection of brass rubbings that provided the essential foundation for his work. Stephenson’s project was a collaborative one that drew heavily on the endeavours of other like-minded antiquaries, and the Society’s Inner Library was the nerve-centre of his operation. Stephenson published extensively, and he left many of his papers and collections to the Society. Together, these sources allow us to build a picture of his working methods and the stages from which the List was to emerge. The article will look afresh at Stephenson’s career, about which hitherto little has been written, looking especially at his private life and the range of his acquaintances, his List and the role of the Society in its creation. It will further attempt an evaluation of his scholarly achievement, considering both his strengths and weaknesses as a scholar, and it will conclude with some reflections on how the listing of brasses has evolved since his time.