It is widely recognized that when marine resources form a significant proportion of the human diet, this results in radiocarbon ages for human remains that are significantly older than the contemporary atmosphere. While there has been widespread assessment of marine 14C reservoir ages, there has been little study of the freshwater equivalent. However, recent analyses of human bone from archaeological sites in the Danube Valley have confirmed the existence of a large freshwater 14C reservoir effect.

The burnt sacrifice of bare (defleshed) bones, described in Homer's Odyssey and well documented from Archaic and Classical Greece, is now clearly attested by burnt faunal remains from the ‘Palace of Nestor’ at Mycenaean Pylos. This evidance is of great importance for understanding both the historical role of sacrifice in Greek religion and the significance of fensting in Mycenaean palatial society.

Photographs produced during archaeological fieldwork can be employed in shaping the nature of archaeological discourse in different parts of the world. Such photographs are material objects that at times show what written texts fail to say. The focus of this paper is on the photographs produced during archaeological surveys and excavations in British India between the last quarter of the 19th and middle of the 20th centuries.

The First World War is beginning to receive archaeological attention. This paper highlights the technical, ethical and political challenges, including recovery and re-burial of the multi-faith dead, excavation of battlefield features and volatile ordnance, and incorporating the sensitive management of multi-vocal landscapes as cultural heritage and tourist destinations.

The declassification of CORONA high-resolution space photography has made a valuable new resource available for the study of ancient landscapes. Using a recent case-study from Syria, examples are given of various ways in which CORONA imagery can significantly enhance regional survey work.

Have ancestors replaces chiefs as the defining entity of prehistory? This provocative view from the Mediterranean world may provoke a little debate.

Historiographic revelations

Back from his famous visit to Boucher de Perthes in the spring of 1859, John Evans hastened to invite some antiquarians friends in London to examine his finds. The flint implements he had collected with Joseph Prestwich in the undisturbed gravel beds of the Somme valley were indeed. or so ho believed, altogether new in appearance and totally unlike anything known in this country [Evans 1869: 93-4):

Several menus designed as invitations/souvenirs for the de Mortillet dinners from 1898 onwards are presented here as an iconographic dossier to illustrate aspects of prehistoric archaeology. These menus are briefly discussed below, and ten of them are reproduced at appropriate locations throughout this special section (with reference to the present text).

The current renewal of interest in the history of archaeology can be explained in several ways, and notably in view of the extraordinary extension of the discipline's objects and methods. In the last decades, the most far-flung regions of the earth have been subjected to systematic exploration, radiometric dating techniques have continually improved, DNA studies have contributed to the transformations of biological anthropology, and indeed the very process of human evolution has heen cast in new light by the changing boundaries between humanity and animality. A natural science for many founding fathers of prehistory, a social science for those who emphasize its anthropological dimensions, archaeology has remained for others a historical discipline by virtue of its proximity to ancient languages and inscriptions. At one end of the spectrum, some archaeologists see themselves as specialists in material culture, able to deal with ohjects, both ancient and modern, as simultaneously technical and semiotic systems. At the other end, there are those who will only put their faith in the detailed approach of singular, particular cultures. To put the matter in extreme terms; it seems as if there existed a universalist archaeology standing in opposition to a plethora of incompatible and irreducible vernacular archaeologies.

Recently a doctoral dissertation was submitted to the Department of Archaeology at IJppsala [Jniversity. The author, Michel Notelid, presented and defended a text, called Den omvanda diskursen (The Second Glance: A study of transitions in the history of archaeological discipline). This work (Notelid 2000; 2001) represents quite a new way of looking at the discipline’s past, with the serious ambition to understand the romantic approach to prehistory in its own right, and not primarily as a fumbling, imaginative and pre-scientific start of a new discipline. The archaeological community was puzzled by this work, and very few scholars were able to read and appreciate this distinctive and unexpected perspective. There were obstacles, and possibly the most difficult one was the very language used. This language was in itself a sort of romantic reconstruction, which did not clearly indicate the difference between the plain text and passages of citations.

The two decades from 1860 to 1880 were one of the most formative periods in the emergence of modern attitudes to scientific inquiry in England, in what were later to become the specialized disciplines of the natural and human sciences. At this high point of Victorian prosperity a small group of scholars established both the principal questions for future research, and the character of the institutions which were to pursue them, in increasingly professional ways, during the following century. Most of the men (for it was an overwhelmingly male community) who were involved with these developments had independent means, either as inherited wealth or as a result of their own involvement in business affairs; and in consequence they were less restricted in pursuit of their interests than many of their successors who occupied paid positions in scientific institutions and universities (Levine 1986; cf. Chapman 1998).

Introduction

On August 3, 1908, two young French clergymen with a passion for prehistory, the brothers Amédée and Jean Bouyssonie, discovered in a cave near the village of La Chapelle-aux-Sains (Department of Corréze) an almost intact Neanderthal skeleton. Recognizing both the importance of their find and their own inexperience with such fossils, they handed the skeleton to Marcellin Boule, professor of palaeontology at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle in Paris.

In February 1944 Mortimer Wheeler, having resigned his duties with the British 8th Army after the Salerno landings, was bound for India. Aboard the City of Exeter, in convoy to Bombay, Wheeler was planning another campaign —to sort out the ‘scientifically deplorable’ state of India’s archaeological survey. Even before he had set a foot on Indian soil, Wheelcr already had a plan. Like all good Officers, colonial and otherwise, Wheeler had determined his plan of attack beforc landing. It is no good to reach a foreign field of a battle and just see what happens. This he had learned from his idol, Lt. General Lane Fox Pitt Rivers; that you must always begin with a plan of attack.

Introduction

In recent years, considerable attention has been dedicated to the involvement of archaeology (and most notably prehistory) with nationalism. The probable causes of this recent fashion1 need not concern 11s here, but the movement itself is ccrtninly welcome, testifying to the reflection of archaeologists on their own practices and those of their predecessors. For historians, this trend is quite welcome insofar as it contributes to a general renaissance of interest in the past of the discipline. However, a more careful examination of this historiography leads us to some caution about its significance.

Chauvinist reactions were rife in late 19th-century France, following the 1870 defeat to Prussia, the unification of Germany and the annexation of Alsace and part of Lorraine to the new empire. Besides their political manifestations, as in the creation of the Ligue des patriotes in 1882, these reactions also received intellectual expression. For most of the cultivated elites, the revelation of Prussian militarism came to negate the prevailing image of Germany as the cosmopolitan heartland of philosophy and of amodel university system. The French military defeat was interpreted as a sign of the political and moral weakness of the regime of Napoleon I11 (Renan 18711, but also as a wider symptom of intellectual inferiority, itself due to the inadequacies of the French educational and university structure. There ensued in intellectual circles a veritable ‘German crisis of French thought’ (Digeon 1959).

Introduction

In this article we set out to analyse, from an archaeological point of view, a political problem which, as demonstrated by current debate, including acts of violence, goes well beyond archaeology. Throughout the 19th century, and especially in its latter half, a centralist political model for Spain was developed in which a political balance could not be found between the State and [lie autonomous traditions of the varions regions of the Iherian Peninsula. As a result of this failure, legitimation programmes began to be constructed towards the end of 19th century, based on the history of the peoples of these regions. This led to a search in protohistorical archaeology [Iberians, Celts, Tartessians, etc.) for a possible solution to the political problems caused by a lack of institutional agreement between states and regions.

Introduction

As a discipline concerned with the past, and especially the remote past, archaeology is in a unique position to contribute to the growing discussion on nationalism and the formation of collective identities. Although research in these areas is not new, the steadily increasing body of archaeological literature is shaped both by recent theoretical trends within the discipline itself and by widespread concerns over contemporary redefinitions of boundaries and identities (e.g. Atkinson et al. 1996; Jones 1997; Graves-Brown et al. 1996; Díaz-Andreu & Chanipion 1996; Kohl & Fawcett 1995).

Introduction: turns and returns

When politicians engage in archaeology, it is convenient for all concerned to say that they ‘turn’ to it: for both parties, this move confirms that the discipline itself is essentially neutral and independent from extrinsic considerations. Already subject to much suspicion, this comforting conception can be further undermined with the case of Field-Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts (1870-1950), for half a century South Africa's leading soldier, statesman and intellectual, as well as a driving force behind the setting up of the Commonwealth and the LJnited Nations (FIGURE 1).

The history of the archaeological disciplines in Germany during the Nazi era can be considered as a locus classicus of nationalist interpretation and misuse of the past. For some time now, various efforts have been made to enhance our understanding of this period, including several aspects related to archaeology and cultural politics. Most studies have been carried on by modern historians, but also archaeologists have engaged in historiographical research on their own discipline. Some freqiiently cited works like Bollmus (1970) Kater (1974) and Losemann (1977) are still fundamental for our understanding of important aspects of Nazi cultural politics as well as the involvement of traditional institutions into the dictatorial system.

The megalithic monuments of Carnac, Brittany, in the Département of the Morbihan, are amongst the most farnous in France. indeed in the world. This region has not only the densest conccntration of such sites in Europe but also retained its importance as a centre of monument-building from the late 5th to the :jrd millennium FK:, giving it a unique significance in the study of Neolithic landscapes (Sherratt 1990; 1998). Its menhirs, stone alignments, and megalithic tombs have attracted the attention of scholars since the 18th century, and there is thus an unusually full record, both written and pictorial, of the nature of these monuments as they were perceived over 300 years.