Pahñu is an archaeological site belonging to the Xajay culture, which inhabited north-central Mesoamerica in 350–1000 AD. Human burials contained in three pairs of contiguous cists were discovered inside a ceremonial structure at Pahñu during excavations conducted between 2019 and 2022. The walls of the cists separated groups of skeletal remains, so the stratigraphic units containing them did not overlap. Stratigraphically speaking, the six groups of remains could have been contemporary and each of the cists could have been used during periods of different durations. Therefore, the analysis of excavation data could not produce a precise temporal sequence of the events that took place in the cists. However, radiocarbon dating by accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) of representative samples of bones, teeth, and charcoal, allowed us to refine the temporal sequence of their placement in each cist and thus have a better understanding of the funerary practices of the Xajay.

The last 20 years have seen growing attention in Scandinavian archaeology towards the study of the Iron Age household. The aim of this paper is to challenge the conceptions of what the household is and argue for the potential in approaching households as heterogenous, emergent assemblages, with an untapped potential in diachronic and spatial studies. Inherent in the vast archaeological record of the Scandinavian Iron Age is a capacity for broader perspectives to explore household processes’ duration and change. Drawing on theoretical insights from the Communities of Practice (COP) framework and assemblage-based thinking, the paper accentuates the household as a key arena for learning, knowledge and identity formation and a heterogeneous unit bound up in changing spheres of interaction. Household practices, or the shared repertoire of households, represent analytical mechanisms that allow for the study of variation, continuity and recalibration, thus providing essential entry points to studies of social processes.

While increased focus in recent decades has been paid to conceptions of time in archaeological interpretation, comparably less attention has been afforded to the way in which we ourselves conceive of time in the construction of chronologies to periodize the past. In this paper, I focus on the tripartite chronology utilized by scholars of the Precolumbian Maya as a case study to explore the potential of a critical approach to archaeological chronologies and periodizations. By examining the chronology's origins and the intellectual histories which underpin it, I demonstrate that the issues at stake are more than questions of temporal accuracy but, rather, matters of reflexivity. Through a process of ‘sublimation’, problematic assumptions and mentalities upon which periodizations were originally constructed are obscured in contemporary usage, leading to the perpetuation of outdated tropes and a conceptual path dependency in narratives of the past. Conversely, appreciating the arbitrary nature of chronological demarcations and treating such frameworks as negotiable and open to revision is a powerful tool in opening up new interpretive possibilities to the narration of the past.

Age estimates from bomb 14C dating conflict with a well-recognized age reading protocol (grinding, polishing and staining in the sagittal plane) for otoliths of European eel (Anguilla anguilla). Proper alignment of calculated hatch years for 14C measurements taken from the earliest otolith growth—among the smallest otolith extractions to date for successful 14C analysis due to the advent of gas-AMS—was not achieved using age estimates from an accepted method. The realignment of otolith 14C values to a tropical bomb 14C reference chronology, which is most applicable to the Sargasso Sea as the natal origin of European eel, led to an increase of the original age estimates by 8 to 32 years. A maximum age of approximately 46 years was determined for the European eel specimen with the most massive otolith, of which mass is a reasonable proxy for age and was instrumental in identifying age estimate discrepancies. By extending the otolith mass-to-age relationships from this study to the most massive otoliths available from archived otoliths of Norway, an increase of up to several decades from the original otolith age estimates was discovered, leading to support for a potential lifespan of 70–100 years in the natural environment.