Field research and predictive modelling of global warming and desertification by environmental scientists in the Mediterranean has concentrated on the short term. In this paper, it is argued that collaboration between the historical sciences, especially archaeology, and the environmental sciences can provide a longer-term perspective on desertification in the Mediterranean. Such collaboration has taken place recently in the Vera basin (Almería, south-east Spain), with the financial support of the European Union. Details of the archaeological and historical sequences of occupation in the basin are given, before presenting the main trends in demography, settlement and political systems from 4000 BC until the present day. This is followed by details of the long-term record of degradation in the Vera basin. The paper concludes by using the long-term record to propose recommendations for the future management of this landscape.

During the third millennium cal BC, there were major changes in many aspects of Cypriot material culture, technology and economy which characterize the division between the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age on the island. Many innovations can be traced to Anatolian antecedents. These include a very wide array of domestic as well as agricultural and industrial technologies. Their nature and range make it possible to argue strongly for the movement of people to the island, rather than for other mechanisms of technology transfer and culture change. This identification of an intrusive group, with distinctive patterns of behaviour (habitus), opens up questions of prehistoric ethnicity, and the processes by which the initial maintenance of different lifeways by indigenous and settler communities eventually gave way to a common cultural system.

This paper draws attention to the fact that east-central Sweden consisted of an extensive archipelago throughout the Stone Age. An image of the Mesolithic cultural landscape is beginning to take shape, since a large number of sites have been found and excavated in recent years. The remains of the sub-regions on the mainland and at the inner margin of the archipelago are interpreted as reflecting changes in material culture without any corresponding change further out. In considering why people of some sub-regions were more susceptible to new ideas than those of others, the specific physical setting and the strong social order prevailing in fishing and seal-hunting communities are regarded as factors which prevent rapid changes.

In this paper, we examine the strategies used by early Mesolithic people as they moved into the karstic uplands of north-eastern Istria, Croatia. These strategies are inferred from detailed analyses of the lithic and faunal assemblages from Šebrn, a small upland rock-shelter occupied for a relatively short period of time in the early Holocene. We conclude that Šebrn's lithic assemblages are in technology and typology relatively homogeneous and can be treated as a single unit (related to the Sauveterrian and Epigravettian, sensu lato). The faunal remains, in contrast, reveal a dynamic situation of temporal changes in the scope and focus of activities on site. Drawing on several lines of evidence from the lithic and faunal assemblages, we suggest that the initial use of the site was intermittent and people who pursued a generalized subsistence strategy visited it. With the passage of time and as people learned about upland environments, they turned to a specialized procurement of red deer. Šebrn became part of a settlement system that related lowlands to uplands and the site gained significance in the cultural landscape as people brought to it expectations about what they would do and how long they would stay.

Archaeologists often seem either sceptical of science-based archaeology or baffled by its results. The underpinnings of science-based archaeology may conflict with social or behavioural factors unsuited to quantification and grouping procedures. Thus, the interaction between archaeologists and their science-based colleagues has been less profitable than it might have been. The main point I consider in this study, and exemplify by considering metals provenance studies in the Bronze Age Mediterranean, is the relevance and application of the stated aims of science-based archaeology to the contemporary discipline of archaeology. Whereas most practitioners today recognize that science-based archaeology has the potential to contribute positively to the resolution of problems stemming from our field's inadequate and incomplete data resource, I contend that science and scientific analyses alone cannot adjudicate between cultural possibilities. Rather they provide analytical data which are likely to be open-ended, subject to multiple social interpretations, and in need of evaluation by collaborating archaeologists using social theory.

The study of landscape as social construction implies considering its economic and territorial dimensions, as much as its symbolic ones. A major topic in such kinds of studies is the reconstruction of the ways in which natural and social space was perceived by past societies. We ought to approach the project of building an archaeology of perception. One of the aims of such a research programme would be the evaluation of the effects of natural and artificial landscape features on past human observers. This paper will argue that a possible strategy for studying these dimensions of past landscapes could be based on the systematic analysis of the visual features of prehistoric monuments and in the characterization of the scenic effects and vistas related to them. A detailed analysis of the pattern of location of megalithic monuments and of their visibility and intervisibility allows us to recognize certain regularities which display an intention to take account of monuments by provoking dramatic artificial effects. In such a way, we could approach a phenomenology of prehistoric perception without falling into merely subjective solutions. This study is based on a systematic review of the megalithic monuments from Sierra de Barbanza (north-west Iberia). Its main aims are: (1) the proposal for a theoretical and methodological study of these phenomena, combined with; (2) a case-study to reconstruct those monumental strategies used to shape cultural landscapes in Neolithic Europe, and; (3) the explanation of continuities and changes of these traditions.

Houses and burials recorded in the settlements of Lepenski Vir I and II and burials previously ascribed to Lepenski Vir III are here discussed in view of the recent analyses of archaeological material and re-analyses of the field burial record from this site. Evidence of pottery in situ in houses of Lepenski Vir I, together with the evidence for important dietary change in the Lepenski Vir community in the course of the second half of the seventh millennium cal BC, reinforces the assumption, made by a number of scholars over several previous decades, of intensive contacts between early Neolithic groups and local hunter-gatherers. Burial practice throughout the seventh and sixth millennia cal BC at Lepenski Vir is thus reanalyzed in this new light. Apart from burials unrelated to architectural remains, five ‘types’ of burial deposition are noted in relation to houses of Lepenski Vir I–II, all but one having a distinct chronological and spatial patterning. The inhabitants' choice of mode of deposition of the deceased is always associated with a certain location in the settlement, sometimes used over several centuries. In the course of their history, these locations were often used for building a particular house or group of houses. The content of such houses is also discussed wherever it was possible. Duality in settlement organization could also be recognized in the burial practices related to settlement architecture. The attribution of the majority of burial remains to early Neolithic Lepenski Vir III is here also questioned in the light of new data and reinterpreted settlement sequences.

A well-built roadway from the early Viking Age at the Rösaring archaeological site in central Sweden is assumed by archaeologists to have been used for processions. The road is here examined in relation to its environment, the sun and the moon, the Milky Way and the rainbow. The aim was to extend landscape archaeology to include natural phenomena and their impact on prehistoric monuments as an aid to conventional archaeology. The play of sunlight over the road at noon was found to be particularly spectacular at midwinter and well-suited for enhancing the performance of rites which could have taken place at a large mound at the south end of the road, possibly in connection with the cult of the Norse fertility god Freyr.

During the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s, garden cemeteries were founded in most cities in Britain. Their characteristic appearance owes much to a British tradition of naturalistic landscape design but has particular resonances in the context of death and mourning in the nineteenth century. This article considers some of the factors that have been significant in the development of the British landscape cemetery, including public health, class relationships and foreign influences (particularly that of Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris). It is argued that none of these things explains the popularity of this particular form of cemetery in Britain; rather, the garden cemetery offered an appealing and appropriate landscape for remembering the dead and mediating the relationship between the dead and the bereaved.

This article discusses the production, distribution and consumption of stone and copper during the Bronze Age in La Mancha. It reviews the archaeological record regarding commodity exchange within this territory in relation to other regions of the Iberian Peninsula. It discusses the results of the analyses of grindstones and metal objects collected along the north-eastern edge of La Mancha, close to the Tagus valley. The materials analysed were obtained from museum collections and recent excavations carried out in this area. We propose a new regionally-based economic model for these resource exploitation activities.

Childbirth in prehistorical contexts is seldom considered since there seems to be an underlying assumption that this event lacks a surrounding and traceable material culture. The argument here is that this is a judgement based upon the refusal to acknowledge childbirth as an important social event. Therefore material remains have not been identified as related to childbirth in the archaeological record. The aim of this article is to show that childbirth as a concept has many important social implications and might in fact be traceable in a wide range of prehistoric material. To illustrate this, two examples of different remains are discussed. Firstly, a skeleton with indications of childbirth, as in the case of the mesolithic ‘Woman of Barum’ found in southern Sweden. In connection with this the social implications of mother, mothering will be discussed. Secondly, the Chalcolithic findings from Kissonerga-Mosphilia, Cyprus, are highlighted and suggested to be the remains of a functional set of birth-related equipment.

This paper looks at representations of antiquity in cyberspace and discusses their meaning and position in global discourses on nationalism and identities. After a critical review of some recent discussions of globalization and the informational society, it adopts the concepts of ethnoscapes, mediascapes and ideoscapes in examining the deployments of representations from antiquity in the web pages constructed by the Greek state, private organizations, and mostly Greek diasporic communities and individuals. It is suggested that organizations and individual social actors construct in cyberspace the national topos of Hellenism. In this process, representations from antiquity play a central and crucial role. Many social actors, mostly away from the ‘homeland’, form modern Hellenic ethnoscapes by projecting the national narrative and constructing an imaginative heterotopia where the personal becomes national and vice versa. These representations act as the currency of the symbolic capital of antiquity, a crucial resource in the foundation of the imagined community of the Hellenic nation. At the same time, they become an effective weapon in the ritual battles and contestations around the polarity between Greece and the West. Finally, representations from antiquity become a device which contributes to the ‘domestication’ of the cyberspace, its transformation from space to place, and its ‘materialization’ through the materiality that the representations of antiquity allude to.

A new procedure is described in which combined lead and strontium isotope analysis of archaeological human dental tissues can be used to comment on the lifetime movements of individuals. A case study is presented of four Neolithic burials – an adult female and three juveniles – from a shared burial pit excavated at Monkton-up-Wimbourne, Dorset. It is demonstrated that the adult's place of origin was at least 80km to the north-west in the area of the Mendips. It is also shown that all three juveniles moved over significant distances during their lives.

There is a wealth of archaeological evidence, from bones excavated in prehistoric middens, piles of fruit stones and sea shells, that give us concrete indications of food consumed at various prehistoric sites around Europe. In addition to this information, we have pollen analysis from settlement sites and charred plant macrofossils. Wetland archaeology informs us in much more detail about not only the types of foods that were being eaten in prehistory but also, in some cases, their cooking techniques. This paper will explore whether or not a popular misconception about the daily diet in prehistory has its roots in the analysis of stomach contents of various bog bodies found in Europe.