This contribution, in memory of the Cambridge archaeologist and cultural theorist, David Clarke (1938–76), investigates the possibility of a coherent description of long-term change on an archaeological time scale. It rejects an earlier (‘processualist’) synthesis based on ecology; but, rather than retreat into an introverted and fragmented post-modernism, it asserts the continuing value of a ‘grand narrative’. It identifies the problems of the neo-evolutionary conception prevalent in the 1960s and early 1970s, and in particular a division into stages, and emphasis on autonomous development, and the priority given to production. In contrast, this presentation emphasises the importance of social interaction and cultural encounter. This interactionist approach is exemplified in new descriptions of the ‘Neolithic’, ‘Urban’, and ‘Industrial’ Revolutions, and discussed as a means of conceptualising some general properties of long-term change.

Indo-European languages are believed to have spread through population movements from the original epicentre. In recent years, this diffusion and divergence of languages from the ∗proto-Indo-European mother tongue has been identified with the dispersal of farming populations from the region of Anatolia/northern Iran, who are held (e.g. by Renfrew) to have gradually colonised Europe between c. 6000 and 3000 bc. It is here argued that this was not necessarily the case, and an alternative explanation for the divergence of Indo-European languages is presented, based on contact, exchange, trade, and intermarriage. Linguistic models for contact-induced language change, the archaeological evidence for such contacts at the transition to farming in Europe, and evidence for the adoption of farming by the local, hunter-gatherer populations are discussed. This leads to the formulation of the ‘Neolithic creolisation hypothesis’. The paper finally suggests a scheme for the divergence of the Indo-European languages following this hypothesis and discusses the linguistic implications.

Forty years ago, Fritz Saxl (1957:73) pointed out that ‘we cannot fully understand our own times unless we pay heed to its unscientific tendencies.’ The Russian historian Bitsilli (1928:351-52) demonstrated that the birth of a nation is always accompanied by some sort of mythology. The idea became especially useful recently with the current development of ethnonationalism, combined with a shift of the international community's sympathy with groups' rights, resulting in an unexpected phenomenon which I call an ‘alternative prehistory’. This alternative prehistory is an explicitly ethnocentric vision of the past, namely, a glorification of the great ancestors of the given people, who are treated as if they made the most valuable contribution to the culture of all humanity. This obviously odd vision of the past flourishes especially at crucial moments of ethnic history: (1) when forceful assimilation and acculturation endanger an ethnic group with cultural and language losses, (2) when particular minorities are fighting against racial discrimination or its consequences, (3) when the people struggle for political liberation, (4) when new states are being built from the ruins of a fonner empire, (5) when a fonner imperial people suffers political, social, and other losses because of unfavourable changes in its status, (6) when two peoples claim rights over the same territory which they have inhabited for years, (7) when a new ethnic group is formed in a given territory out of newcomers of various ethnic origins, and (8) when a formerly united people finds itself under conditions of a diaspora. In all these cases, the myth of the past is aimed at inspiring self-esteem in order to withstand hardship and to mobilise people for decisive social and political action. At the same time, as Wailes and Zoll (1995:24-25) point out quite reasonably, the myth of the past results in an explicit or implicit discourse about who has civilised whom which tends towards the construction of a hierarchy of groups headed by one of them as an ‘elder brother’ (Shnirelman 1996b:60). That is not just an intellectual game since quite often there are real political, social, and economic interests at stake. lbis paper is a result of my comparative studies made during the last few years dealing with contemporary ethno-nationalist myths of the past based on the idea of ethnogenesis. In other words I have tried to investigate how contemporary ethno-nationalists manipulate materials (true, fictitious, or even consciously falsified) on the origins of peoples, how they invent ancestors and their glorious deeds, and why they do it. My analysis is based mainly on data from the former USSR and contemporary Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), but information from some other countries was also considered (Shnirelman 1993a; 1993c; 1994b; 1995b; 1995c; 1995d; 1996a; 1996b; 1996c; in press a and bi Shnirelman and Komarova 1995). Here, I shall discuss the general features of this sort of mythology and its consequences. A problem is that, in order to make its claims for political rights and ambitions much stronger, a group has to demonstrate the deep roots of its culture, the distinctiveness of its language, and all its outstanding cultural achievements. Keeping these ends in mind, the cultural activists occupy themselves with what Eric Hobsbawm (1983) called ‘an invention of traditions’ (see also Gellner 1983; Anderson 1991). But the main strategy nowadays is the use and abuse of history and, in many cases, prehistory or proto-history.

This article suggests that the common appearance of cultural (‘midden’) material under barrows of the Trichterbecher culture is interpreted as the purposeful metaphor of continuity of the small-scale society that has just suffered the loss of one or more of its actors. The three stages of rites de passage as outlined by van Gennep are used to explain the mortuary rituals further. Separation was signified by the enclosure (ditch or palisade) around the future barrow site and a ‘facade’. The liminal stage may be marked archaeologically by the ‘cleansing’ of fire or dismantling of facades at the barrow entrance, and sometimes by ploughing, which destroyed the cultural material on the site. Reintegration was the ‘planting’ of the deceased under soil and the erection of the barrow. The paper concludes with implications for the growth of a lineage organisation of society.

This article is, in a way, a dissenting voice from the conviction that central European archaeology plays an essential role in settlement research. In central European archaeology, one constantly finds that a modified version of evolutionism is applied, based mainly on an intimate knowledge of the source materials, ordered into the most precise chronological sequences possible. Settlement research is not only a mere spatial study of a society but also a study of societies through space. For different research to be comparable, it is necessary to maintain similar rules and methods of explanation. This article deals with the traditional concepts of settlement research pertaining to central European archaeology.

Investigating three Bronze-Age cemeteries in a small area near the rock carvings of Norrköping, Östergötland, Sweden, this paper suggests that the social and economic structure of the area was not necessarily homogeneous, although this is the traditional view. Variations in the burial practices are analysed: burial construction, grave goods present, and treatment of cremated bones. An elite is suggested as having existed at settlements using the cemeteries at Klinga and Fiskeby, those using Ringeby were less organised or controlled. A speculative interpretation is offered: that Ringeby served as a subsistence area for the ‘central place’ of rock-carving activity, and lacked the benefits of trade and bronze supplies.

Although archaeology is the study of the past, archaeologists have always been among the first to espouse the latest technology of the present to further their ends. The World Wide Web is no exception; but how is this to benefit archaeology and what are the short- and long-term gains to be expected? On 1st June 1995, the Museum of Antiquities of the University and Society of Antiquaries of Newcastle upon Tyne was the first museum in Britain to release a museum exhibition in virtual form on to the Internet via the World Wide Web (WWW). Its location on the Internet (the URL) is http://www.ncl.ac.uk/∼nantiq/index.html. In this article, the authors will use the experience gained directly from this experiment to open the debate about communicating archaeology via the Internet.

The concept of ideology has figured centrally in recent accounts of the fundamental social transformation sweeping Europe from the mid-fifth to second millennia BC. In particular, many have focussed on the human body as a principal medium of ideological expression, notably in terms of a growing ‘prestige goods ideology’. This paper endeavours to expose the deficiencies of this model, which lie in its overly cynical nature and its disregard for the specific socio-cultural contours of status expression. Specifically, by linking the ‘ideological’ transformations of this Period to the development of a distinct institution, a male warrior status group, and its package of expressive themes - individualism, warfare, bodily ornamentation, horses and wheeled vehicles, the hunt, the ritual consumption of alcohol - I seek to demonstrate that the changing treatment of the human body in mortuary rites and in everyday life is more than ideological. In particular, it is implicated in the development of a coherent life style, and as such is fundamentally bound up with changing notions of Personhood and self-identity. Running through the fabric of this life style, through its embodiment of the subject in both life and death, is an equally distinctive notion of male beauty, unique to the warrior.

This paper examines the cultural influences from the European continent on the material culture of Scandinavian local communities during the late Bronze Age. A connection between the cremation ritual and pottery as ritual equipment is claimed. The paper suggests a close link between religious ritual and the elaborate pottery types that characterise the late Bronze Age; a connection between material culture and mental ideas. The emphasis on pottery during the Bronze Age is thus a product of the change in meaning for pottery. The new pottery styles have an embodied symbolic meaning connected to the new religion with its different ideas and rites. There is also a change from a domestic sphere to a ritual one.

Despite the extensive household assemblages excavated in Pompeii, material culture studies of this site have been dominated by epigraphical, architectural, and art-historical studies. A database of the excavated contents of 30 Pompeian houses (863 rooms and 6,300 artefacts) was compiled in order to rectify this situation. It was used to investigate room use and the living conditions in Pompeii between AD 62 and AD 79, through these assemblages.

Because of the nature of the excavation records, much effort was required to process the available data in a meaningful and useful manner. Also the state of prior research in this area required the deconstruction of past, predominantly text-based, assumptions about these specific issues. However, using methods and analytical processes appropriate to such an investigation of a previously excavated site, this study was able to present a new perspective on living conditions in the last decades in Pompeii, in particular, and on Roman domestic life and site formation processes, more generally.

Two new series of radiocarbon dates on human bones from passage graves in the Falbygden area in south-western Sweden are presented. It has long been nearly axiomatic that dolmens appeared earlier than passage graves, but the new dates indicate taht both types of megalithic grave were introduced at the same time in the later part of the early Neolithic. This also means that the oldest types vary between different regions. In Denmark, the oldest type of megalithic grave is the domens, while passage graves were built from the beginning in Falbygden.

A critical evaluation of the appropriateness of traditional ‘Hellenization’ and recently popular ‘world-systems’ interpretive perspectives on the colonial encounter in Iron Age western Europe is offered. These approaches are shown to have some common flaws stemming from shared implicit premises resulting from a profoundly embedded cultural legacy of hegemonic Helleno-centrism that permeates interpretive discourse. This legacy is a result of the construction during the Renaissance of a European identity with ancestral roots in ancient Greece and Rome and the consequent importance of these classical cultures to the definition of ‘cultural capital’ in modem Euro-American society. Additionally, world-systems models have problematic tendencies toward mechanistic structural overdetermination and reductionism. An alternative interpretive strategy, grounded in the anthropology of consumption and the historical anthropology of colonialism, is applied to the initial phase of the colonial encounter during the Early Iron Age. This brief example illustrates the necessity and possibility of restoring a consideration of local agency and culture to the archaeological analysis of colonial situations and of developing a more subtle means of understanding the relationship between local practice and global structures and processes.

Women are often depicted on Romano-British mosaics either as non-specific allegorical characters without personalities, such as personifications of seasons, fortune, learning, and so on, or as figures representative of the forces of nature, such as Medusa or the seasons. Medusa, often identified with chaos, is depicted already neutralised through the nature of her representation; while the seasons are frequently coupled with a male mythological figure such as Bacchus, related to the contrast between nature and culture. Other scenes of male association with culture include scenes from the hunt. Idealised portrayals of Roman social interests focus on male-oriented activities; activities of specifically female interest are not known. These representations are interpreted in light of Sherry Ortner's social attributes of a ‘universal subordination of women’.

The author shows that the model of world systems economic theory remains the most probable explanation of the forms of contacts between indigenous peoples and colonists. The six zones where the imported goods from Mediterranean ‘states’ are found to be most numerous are analysed here. They are distributed from east to west across Europe along a discontinuous arc at some distance from the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. They have analogously similar structures, conforming to the principles of world-systems economics. Such similarities are surprising because the a priori probability of finding such similarities is so small given the environmental, historical, and cultural differences, as well as those of the human spirit, imagination and inventiveness. We must suppose that a powerful logic was driving this phenomenon. The criticisms directed at this model are often made by those who are habitually ‘anti-’ … More complex and interesting is the alternative explanation proposed by J. Bintliff and M. Dietler. An analysis of the correlation of the drop in the number of sites with these imported goods and increased distance contradicts their alternative. Moreover, there is not one example of development on the same scale and level of integration as these ‘chiefdoms’ without mediterranean contacts. Finally, the significance of the model may be measured by the frequency that oppontents caricature it in order to criticise it more easily.

This article suggests methods for recognising and recovering symbolic significance in archaeological material. It develops the idea that there are three principal (and overlapping) spheres of the human world. In the first, ‘artefacts’ have a practical purpose and function physically on their immediate surroundings. In the second sphere, ‘institutions’ have a social purpose and function to organise human relationships. In the third, ‘texts’ have a communicative purpose and function through symbolic significance. Application of the ‘elimination method’ starts by testing the first two spheres before undertaking an analysis of possible symbolic significance. The paper uses prehistoric fortifications and houses with sunken floors in Bohemia as examples.

This paper looks at how prehistory was portrayed and taught in Spanish school books in four periods (1880–1920; 1920–36; 1936–75; 1975 onwards). Through the first three periods the scientific advances of archaeology can be seen to enter books often only after a time lag of decades, and only after the dominance of scripture for human ‘origins’ gave way to secular versions of history. But until the death of Franco, there was a strong tradition of emphasising nationalistic sentiments of heroic resistance and positive characteristics of the Spanish’ race’ while concentrating on events and the deeds of individuals, usually military or political. This is graphically demonstrated with illustrations from textbooks. Since 1975 school books have changed radically. This is seen in the shift in illustrative teaching materials, from reconstructed scenes of political events to maps and pictures of source materials.

This paper summarises the present state of research concerning late-Iron-Age rectilinear enclosures of central Europe known as ‘Viereckschanzen’. For several decades these large earthen enclosures were believed to be Celtic temples or sanctuaries. In the context of recent excavations, multiple social, political, and religious functions have been suggested, but these arguments are rarely linked to detailed study of archaeological materials and features at the enclosures. Critical analysis of presumed ‘cultic’ features and objects at thirty-six excavated Viereckschanzen reveals little support for the suggestion that all enclosures were religious sanctuaries. A functional study of ceramic finds indicates important differences in pottery assemblages between the enclosures and contemporary settlements. The enclosures are then examined within a dialectical landscape context, and it is suggested that they may have functioned as feasting places that often made reference to traditional forms of socio-political organisation represented at earlier cemetery sites.

The paper begins by underlining the existence in Europe of two opposing views on the role that archaeology is to play: the Anglo-American conception and the Mediterranean one. The Spanish situation should be understood within the second, by analysing the legislative, economic, and social background of archaeological activity in the country and by stressing the determining role that the state plays. Next, reference is made to the development of archaeological enterprises created during the last decade, which coincides the recommendations made by the European Council. The general lack of participation by private sponsors in archaeological activities is discussed, followed by a reflection on the legal conditions of the commerce of archaeological goods and the role played by various kinds of institutions and private collectors in the encouragement of plunder. The conclusion stresses the relevance that institutions such as the EAA can have on safeguarding the European archaeological heritage - bearing in mind a respectful attitude towards the different national feelings - by their contribution towards increased integration.

There are three sources of information regarding the social, political, and economic status of women in the European Iron Age, and all three are problematic. First, there are the classical sources, which describe Celtic society from the ‘civilised’ Mediterranean perspective, whether Greek or Roman. These often tell us more about the observer's culture than about the Celtic societies being described. Second, there are the insular Celtic laws and legends, which are compromised by time, distance, and the transformative effects of Christianity. Third, there is the archaeological record, which can only produce answers if the questions asked are the right ones, and is often seriously flawed with respect to preservation and recovery. Unfortunately, archaeologists are still some way from developing a methodology of reconstructing gender roles on the basis of excavated material culture remains. I would like to discuss an archaeological example which may provide some useful guidelines for generating such a methodology, with reference to all three of the sources mentioned above. The approach presented here makes use of written, ethnographic, and archaeological sources in a way that is not always possible in all research contexts. However, there have been a few recent attempts at such a synthesis (Claassen 1992; Spector 1993; Robb 1994), which suggest that a partnership between the written, ethnographic, and archaeological records regarding the subject of gender yields more than any of these sources of information alone can produce. Where such complementary data sets exist they should be made to work in tandem, as this discussion will show.