Come together

Many of the most instantly recognisable world archaeology sites are places originally intended to bring together large groups of people. Whether to eat and drink, commune with one another or with the gods, or to work or be entertained, for millennia people have gathered at sites and monuments such as Gobekli Tepe, Stonehenge, the Colosseum, Cahokia, Angkor Wat and the Great Mosque at Samarra. Over the past two years, however, restrictions imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic have greatly limited the opportunities for people to assemble in physical places. Instead, many of us have gathered with friends, relatives and work colleagues in virtual spaces, leaving hotels, offices and sports stadiums eerily quiet. Of all the gatherings shifted online, from children's parties to parliamentary debates, perhaps the easiest to adapt has been the scholarly conference. Indeed, there are some obvious advantages over the traditional in-person format, from lower costs and fewer organisational logistics to larger and more diverse audiences. Two years of logging on to presentations at all hours, however, have also highlighted those opportunities and experiences of in-person conferences that are difficult to replicate online. Emoticons are no substitute for the energy, nuance, conviviality and serendipity of the real world. Consequently, with many, if not all, countries lifting restrictions and international travel reopening, the 2022 in-person archaeology conference calendar looks particularly full, including EAA (Budapest), WAC (Prague), PanAf (Zanzibar), SEAA (Daegu, South Korea) and IPPA (Chiang Mai, Thailand).

The annual meeting of the Society of American Archaeologists (SAA) was the first of the large in-person conferences to return since the start of the pandemic. At the very end of March, 2500 face-masked delegates, including members of the Antiquity team, gathered in Chicago for the organisation's first in-person annual meeting since Albuquerque in 2019. In doing so, we were reminded of some of the downsides of such mega-conferences—not least the costs—but also, more importantly, of the unique benefits: catching up with old acquaintances and making new contacts, exchanging news and views (free of the thought that they will be forever available on YouTube), sampling local specialities and experiencing new places. The latter included a special evening opening of the Field Museum and the opportunity to browse its extensive archaeological collections from China, Egypt, the Pacific and the Americas. Sadly, the renovation of the Native North America Hall was not quite complete in time for the SAA meeting, though the curators were on hand in the gallery space to greet delegates and discuss the plans; the new displays subsequently opened at the end of May (Figure 1). The redesigned gallery has been guided by an advisory council of 11 Indigenous scholars and museum professionals, and co-curated with 125 representatives of over 100 communities. The exhibition ‘Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories’ explains the approach to the redesign, moving away from chronology and object typology to focus on stories emphasising the worldviews of Native American and First Nations peoples, and the challenges ahead as much as the history behind.

Figure 1. Rendering of the Field Museum's newly renovated Native North America Hall exhibition titled ‘Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories’, which opened 20 May 2022 (photograph © Field Museum).

Back in the SAA Exhibit Hall, at the Antiquity stand we had the pleasure of catching up with many of our authors, reviewers and readers. As one of the sponsors of the Student Paper Award, we also had the opportunity to meet and congratulate Kirsty Escalante on her winning paper: ‘Looting and lidar: an analysis of illicit digging in La Corona, Guatemala using airborne laser scanning’. The use of remotely sensed data for the detection and assessment of looting and other damage to archaeological sites has frequently featured in the pages of Antiquity.Footnote ¹ Much of this work has focused on the arid landscapes of the Middle East; Kirsty's research investigates the densely forested landscapes of Central America and makes the case for the wider application of lidar in this very different environment to help combat the persistent and widespread looting of sites across the region.

Still on the theme of the SAA, in the current issue, Gayoung Park, Li-Ying Wang and Ben Marwick deploy text-mining techniques to abstracts from the Society's annual meetings to assess the degree to which archaeologists have engaged with the topic of racism. Evaluating nearly 70 000 abstracts drawn from 41 annual meetings, the authors identify very limited discussion of racism-related topics over the past 50 years, although they do note an uptick over the past decade. Moreover, the results suggest that most of the attention to racism documented in the abstracts relates to the research of historical archaeologists working on the last few centuries, with much less discussion amongst specialists of other, earlier periods. Taking the results of their analysis as representative of the wider discipline, the authors argue that the limited engagement of archaeologists with racism is a matter of concern. Events such as the killing of George Floyd have vividly illustrated the systemic inequalities that structure contemporary society; archaeologists are one of the best-placed groups to document the historical trajectories that explain how these inequalities arose, in turn helping wider society to tackle these issues more effectively. This is a responsibility not exclusively for historical archaeologists of the post-medieval Atlantic world, but rather a mission for the wider discipline and all its many areas of specialisation.

A few minutes’ walk from the SAA meeting venue is one of Chicago's many public art installations. At the corner of Grant Park, 106 headless human figures, each nearly 3m tall and made of cast iron, are gathered together in a confusing throng. It is strange now to recall that in many countries over the past two years, a gathering of this size—let alone of 2500—would have been illegal. The artwork, by the Polish artist Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930–2017), is named ‘Agora’, alluding to the space for public assembly at the centre of the ancient Greek city. The best-known agora is that of Athens, by coincidence, the venue for another gathering of archaeologists during the week before the SAA meeting.

Concrete controversies

In late March, the latest ‘How to write a successful article’ workshop, organised by the ‘Dialogues with the Past’ (DIALPAST) graduate school, convened at the Norwegian Institute at Athens. DIALPAST is a long-established network of institutions in the Nordic and Baltic regions that provides training for PhD students in the form of small, intensive workshops focused on skills such as grant writing, or themes such as urbanism. Part of the programme's success stems from hosting the workshops in settings such as the Norwegian Institute at Athens and the Swedish Research Institute in Istanbul, to allow the participants to focus intensively on presentations and discussion, and, of course, to explore the host cities. As the programme has inevitably had to adopt a virtual form over the past two years, the Athens meeting was a welcome return to the in-person format. Over three days, 11 early career researchers shared draft articles for peer review on subjects ranging from contract archaeology in Sweden to the biocultural heritage of Mozambique. We look forward to seeing the final versions of these articles published in due course—perhaps even in the pages of Antiquity!

Close by the Norwegian Institute is the Acropolis Museum with its extraordinary collection of Archaic and Classical sculpture, minus, of course, a substantial part of the Parthenon frieze. Fragments of the Parthenon are housed in museums across Europe—there is even a chunk of marble from the temple embedded in the wall of Chicago's Tribune Tower—but demands for repatriation inevitably focus on the British Museum. Late last year, the British government again rebuffed Greek demands to return the marbles for display in the purpose-built Acropolis Museum. In January this year, however, the museum welcomed the return of a fragment of the Parthenon frieze from the Antonino Salinas Museum in Palermo (Figure 2). The repatriation of this piece, though small and featuring only the foot of the city's patron goddess Athena, is of great symbolic significance, and the official ceremony to unveil the fragment took place in the presence of the Greek prime minister, Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Ostensibly on an eight-year loan in exchange for a marble statue of Athena, it is hoped that the piece will become a permanent loan.

Figure 2. A fragment of the Parthenon's east frieze, featuring Athena's foot and the hem of her peplos, returned from Palermo to Athens in early 2022 (photograph © Acropolis Museum).

Meanwhile, up on the Acropolis, a different controversy was the subject of discussion. Prior to the pandemic, some 3.5 million visitors per year ascended the rocky citadel to explore the heart of ancient Athens and to take in the breathtaking views of the modern city. As part of plans to improve accessibility and better manage the flow of visitors, during lockdown, the Ministry of Culture and Sports has overseen the installation of a new lift for wheelchair users and the laying of concrete pathways across the summit (Figure 3). The changes—both those already implemented as well as further planned interventions—have sharply divided opinion. Concerns raised include commercial pressures to increase still further the numbers of visitors and the use of inappropriate materials. Conversely, supporters point to the need to reduce the number of accidents and to improve access for those with mobility issues, emphasising that the concrete paths are laid on a membrane to ensure that the interventions are reversible. Certainly, anyone who has walked across the outcropping limestone of the Acropolis, polished by 2500 years of visitors’ feet, will know how treacherous its surface can be; disabled and infirm visitors in particular will welcome the possibility of exploring the site in more safety and comfort (even if the new panoramic lift is not for the faint hearted!). Nor is the provision of access for those with mobility issues a matter of solely contemporary concern; readers may recall a recent Antiquity article on ramps at ancient Greek healing sanctuaries, such as Corinth and Epidauros, arguing that these represent the planned provision of access for those with impaired mobility.Footnote ²

Figure 3. One of the new visitor paths on the Acropolis, looking towards the Propylaia (photograph by R. Witcher).

The Acropolis is synonymous with Greece and it is therefore no surprise that the curation of the site and its monuments should stir such strong opinions. Meanwhile, down in the Agora, among the early spring flowers, two philosophers were engaged in an impossible dialogue. Installed as part of the ‘Year of Cultural Tourism of Greece and China’, Wu Weishan's ‘Socrates and Confucius: an encounter’ imagines the two thinkers in conversation (Figure 4). In reality, Confucius died a decade before Socrates was born and the worlds in which the two men lived were separated by 7500km. Yet, as noted by Gore Vidal in an introduction to his historical novel Creation, “One man, had he lived to be seventy-five, could have known Socrates, Zoroaster, the Buddha and Confucius”.Footnote ³ Vidal rightly goes on to observe “That anyone might have done so is highly unlikely …”. Nonetheless, the act of imagining such fifth-century BC encounters, as Vidal's novel demonstrates, is a powerful means through which to explore the emergence and interaction of contemporaneous Eurasian religions and civilisations, and their different worldviews.

Figure 4. ‘Socrates and Confucius: an encounter’, by Wu Weishan, installed in the Athenian Agora, with the Temple of Hephaestus in the background (photograph by R. Witcher).

The 2022 Antiquity and Ben Cullen Prizes

In 2021, Antiquity featured 77 research articles, plus three debate sections, showcasing new archaeological research from around the world. Trends include the continuing popularity of isotope analysis for the reconstruction of diet and mobility, research on Central Asia and Mongolia, the revisiting of museum collections using new archaeological science techniques, theoretical engagements with objects, and the analysis of twentieth-century conflict landscapes. From among this diverse range of research, members of our editorial advisory board and the Antiquity Trust have selected two articles for the award of the 2022 prizes.

The winners of the Antiquity Prize are Ian Armit and David Reich for their article, ‘The return of the Beaker folk? Rethinking migration and population change in British prehistory’. The rapid growth of ancient DNA research over the past decade has generated entirely new datasets through which to understand population histories, ranging in scale from studies of the relationships between individuals buried within a single long barrow to sweeping accounts of continent-spanning migrations. At the same time, concerns have been voiced about some of this fast-paced research. Criticisms have included a reliance on over-simplified hypotheses and, especially, a lack of attention to archaeological context; others have hinged on concerns about the explicit or implicit revival of long-outdated concepts and the risk that such narratives could be misappropriated for political ends. Like Socrates and Confucius, it can sometimes seem that direct communication is impossible—after all, archaeologists and palaeogeneticists speak different languages and occupy different worldsFootnote ⁴—yet dialogue and collaboration are essential if, collectively, we are to harness the potential of the full range of evidence in a truly transdisciplinary way.

The winning article by Armit and Reich provides one model for such collaboration, in which the authors critically and systematically review both the genetic and cultural evidence for population change in Early Bronze Age Britain. Their starting point is a recent study that documents massive genetic turnover in Europe during the second half of the third millennium BC—a change that broadly coincides with the arrival in Britain of the Beaker complex.Footnote ⁵ To conflate the contemporaneous appearance of new cultural practices with the arrival of migrants may be tempting, but to do so risks an uncritical return to early twentieth-century ideas equating culture with genes. Instead, Armit and Reich review the strengths and weaknesses of the datasets and use these to inform two alternative hypotheses—Beaker Colonisation and Steppe Drift—that demonstrate how the same evidence can be interpreted in very different ways, the latter not requiring any equation of people and pots. Rather than seeking a definitive answer, the authors counsel caution, setting out the new archaeological evidence we need to gather in order to evaluate objectively between the two hypotheses. In this way, Armit and Reich's article illustrates the type of collaboration needed to build nuanced and robust integrated interpretations of the archaeological and palaeogenetic data.

Staying in prehistoric Britain, the winner of the 2022 Ben Cullen Prize is ‘The original Stonehenge? A dismantled stone circle in the Preseli Hills of west Wales’ by Mike Parker Pearson, Josh Pollard, Colin Richards, Kate Welham, Timothy Kinnaird, Dave Shaw, Ellen Simmons, Adam Stanford, Richard Bevins, Rob Ixer, Clive Ruggles, Jim Rylatt and Kevan Edinborough. Archaeologists have long recognised that the bluestones of Stonehenge originated in the Preseli Hills of Pembrokeshire and recent geochemical analyses have finally pinpointed their exact geological sources, with archaeological excavations identifying evidence of Neolithic quarrying.Footnote ⁶ But were these stones extracted with the express intention that they would be transported over 200km to Salisbury Plain for use in a specific monumental project? Or might their long journey across southern Britain have been only the final chapter of a longer and unforetold story? In their winning article, Parker Pearson's team presents the results of fieldwork at Waun Mawn in south-west Wales. This, they argue, was the site of a large and early circle of bluestones sourced from the nearby quarries of Craig Rhos-y-Felin and Carn Goedog. OSL and radiocarbon dates indicate that the circle was erected during the second half of the fourth millennium BC. Then, c. 3000 BC, the circle was largely dismantled and most of the bluestones removed from the site; around the same time, dozens of bluestones arrived on Salisbury Plain and were incorporated into Stonehenge. Pointing not only to the compatible dates, but also to the similarities between the size and solstitial alignments of Waun Mawn and Stonehenge stage 1, as well as the similar shapes and geological provenance of some of the stone pillars, the authors argue that the bluestones of Stonehenge had originally formed part of an earlier monument: the Waun Mawn stone circle. Indeed, that these stones already possessed complex biographies before their long journey eastward may help to explain why such effort was expended to bring them to Stonehenge, where they have remained—in various different arrangements—for the past 5000 years.

Many congratulations to our winning authors, and to all of those who published in Antiquity last year, helping to make it, yet again, the most downloaded volume to date. Accompanied by a BBC2 documentary and covered by more than 70 news outlets around the world, ‘The original Stonehenge?’ was the most downloaded Antiquity article of the year. Other 2021 articles featuring in the most-downloaded list include ‘Early alphabetic writing in the ancient Near East: the ‘missing link’ from Tel Lachish’; ‘The mustatils: cult and monumentality in Neolithic north-western Arabia’; ‘The last meal of Tollund Man: new analyses of his gut content’; and ‘The mirror, the magus and more: reflections on John Dee's obsidian mirror’. If you haven't yet had the opportunity, you can catch up with the two winning articles, along with an archive of all the previous winners, at: https://antiquity.ac.uk/open/prizes.

Ukraine

On 24 February, President Putin ordered Russian Federation troops into neighbouring Ukraine, starting the largest military offensive in Europe since the Second World War. The ensuing months of conflict have seen millions displaced, thousands killed and the wide-scale destruction of the country's infrastructure. The execution of civilians at Bucha and the razing of the port-city of Mariupol are but two examples of the violence perpetrated in support of one man's twisted view of European history. Core to a proper understanding of that past, and to countering its misappropriation for such malign political purposes, are archaeology and cultural heritage. As with other conflict situations, the immediate priority must be to protect human life; it is essential, however, that the cultural heritage of Ukraine is also safeguarded to help ensure the country's future once the immediate crisis has passed. As seen repeatedly in conflicts around the world, historic buildings, monuments and museum collections are frequently targeted with the intention of inflicting symbolic harm; they can also be an indirect casualty of the breakdown of authority, which may lead to the failure of heritage protection laws and the looting of archaeological sites and museums.Footnote ⁷ Antiquity joins with other archaeological organisations in condemning the Russian invasion of Ukraine, calling for an end to military action and for respect for international laws protecting human rights and cultural heritage.Footnote ⁸ We stand in support of Ukraine, our Ukrainian colleagues and all those, regardless of nationality, who oppose Putin's war.

The notion of a ‘cultural crossroads’ is a cliché of archaeological research. Nonetheless, the metaphor well describes Ukraine's rich and diverse past, both in the east–west movement of peoples, objects and ideas across the Eurasian Steppe, and in the north–south links between the Baltic and the Mediterranean via the Dnipro River and the Black Sea. These sprawling connections are reflected in some of Ukraine's World Heritage Sites, such as Kyiv's Saint Sophia Cathedral, built during the Kyivian Rus, and the ancient city of Chersonesus and its hinterland. Originally founded by Greek colonists on the Crimean coast in the fifth century BC, Chersonesus was added to the World Heritage Site list in 2013, just a year before Russia seized control of the peninsula. That occupation, now clearly revealed as a prelude to Putin's greater ambitions in Ukraine, has instigated a long-running dispute concerning a travelling exhibition called ‘Crimean Treasures’, which was on display at Amsterdam's Allard Pierson Museum in 2014 at the time of the invasion. The ownership of the collection of Greek and Scythian objects is disputed on one side by the Ukrainian state and on the other by the Crimean museums—now under Russian control—which originally organised the loan. During the subsequent years of legal proceedings, the collection has remained in the Netherlands pending a definitive court ruling. The final decision of the Dutch Court of Appeal was announced in late 2021, directing the museum to return the objects to Kyiv; Russia's latest incursion into Ukrainian territory will no doubt further delay their repatriation.

Among the most emblematic features of Ukrainian archaeology are the Trypillia megasites. Between c. 5000 and 2800 BC, the Cucuteni-Trypillia complex stretched across a vast territory from the area of modern Kyiv, south-west through Moldova and into Romania. From the end of the fifth millennium BC in the eastern, Ukrainian, part of this territory, a series of vast sites developed, unprecedented not only in the region but around the world at that date. Reaching as much as 300ha in size, the megasites are characterised by a large central open space, surrounded by concentric rings of rectangular houses and with limited evidence for monumental structures. The early date, size and location of these sites raise many questions concerning their social organisation and about whether they were seasonally or permanently occupied, long- or short-lived, and how they relate to broader narratives of ‘urbanism’. Regardless of exactly how these questions are answered, the megasites clearly represent one of the crucial early chapters for our investigations of how people experimented with new ways of gathering in large numbers. Recent projects have transformed our understanding of these sites,Footnote ⁹ but there is still much more to be learned about them once the cessation of the current conflict allows research to resume.

In this issue

Elsewhere in this issue, we feature our usual diverse geographic and chronological mix, ranging from Palaeolithic Iberia through to the declassification of US intelligence satellite imagery. Among the other articles on offer, Hazel Moore and colleagues take us to Bronze Age Orkney to examine a period often overshadowed by the better-known Orcadian Neolithic. The results of an extensive excavation of a contemporaneous settlement and cemetery complex provide the basis for a multidisciplinary approach to questions of social organisation and human mobility. The unusually high temporal resolution of the evidence, combined with aDNA, opens up discussion of patrilocal marriage, inheritance and migration. Moving to Central Asia, Elissa Bullion and colleagues report on the excavation of an early Muslim cemetery in Uzbekistan, the results of which challenge established narratives about religious conversion in some of the more remote parts of the Islamic world. And in Alabama, Jan Simek and colleagues take us underground into the claustrophobic space of the ‘19^th Unnamed Cave’ to reveal an astonishing series of Native American mud glyphs, including anthropomorphic figures incised on the cave's low ceiling, each so large that it can only be seen in its entirety using photogrammetry. We also feature six new Project Gallery articles and the book reviews section, and former Antiquity editor Chris Scarre casts his eye over the British Museum's ‘The World of Stonehenge’ exhibition. As ever, we trust that there is something of interest for everyone.

COVID permitting, we will hopefully all have more opportunities to travel and meet up in 2022. Antiquity will be attending the World Archaeological Congress in Prague, the meeting of the European Association of Archaeologists in Budapest and the Theoretical Archaeology Group conference in Edinburgh. If you are attending any of these gatherings, do please come along and visit the Antiquity stand—we'd love to see you in person! And, of course, you can always get in touch any time with your queries about submissions and ideas for special sections; all our contact details can be found at: https://antiquity.ac.uk/contact.