In this article, we examine aspects of the Postglacial colonization processes that took place in central Norway during the Early Mesolithic (c. 9500–8000 cal bc). The distribution of sites from this period shows that the colonizers approached and exploited two very different landscapes and resource situations—from archipelagic to alpine. Based on twelve artefact assemblages from central Norway we investigate how colonizing populations met the challenge posed by varying ecozones. Did they organize their settlements and technologies in similar ways or did they modify sites and activities in relation to the different locations? The aspects studied are site organization, artefact composition, projectiles, and lithic raw material use. It appears that the sites are of a similar size and structure across ecozones. Apart from some variations in tool composition, there is no evidence in the lithic material for any technical adaptation towards specific ecozones. We conclude that using a standard, generalized lithic technology, combined with high mobility and small group size, enabled the colonizing groups to overcome the risks and difficulties associated with settling and seeking out resources in new and unknown landscapes.

As Nadia Maria El Cheikh has said of the harem in western scholarship on the premodern Islamic world, slavery and the slave trade have yet to be fully historicized. While scholars of Abbasid-era slavery have made tremendous contributions in this regard over the last two decades, there remain ample opportunities to expand the chronological and geographic scope of their work. What does it mean to historicize slavery in the medieval Islamic Middle East and why is it worth doing?

In this article, I detail the British imperial system of human resource mobilization that recruited workers and peasants from Egypt to serve in the Egyptian Labor Corps in World War I (1914–18). By reconstructing multiple iterations of this network and analyzing the ways that workers and peasants acted within its constraints, this article provides a case study in the relationship between the Anglo-Egyptian colonial state and rural society in Egypt. Rather than seeing these as two separate, autonomous, and mutually antagonistic entities, this history of Egyptian Labor Corps recruitment demonstrates their mutual interdependence, emphasizing the dialectical relationship between state power and political subjectivity.

Several regions in Britain saw the construction of large, linear earthworks of banks and ditches during the later Bronze Age and in the Iron Age, often extending for many kilometres. In the light of recent theoretical discussions of materiality and relational agency within archaeology and other social sciences, and through an avowedly discursive poetics of place, examples of these earthworks are re-assessed as actants, capable of affecting and directing the lives of people, animals, and plants. These linear earthworks were not static monuments, but were active assemblages or meshworks of materiality, movement, and memory.

This article examines the location and context of archaeological investigations in England between 1938 and 1945. The analysis of sources, including national inventories and contemporary journals, dispels any notion that archaeological practice was suspended during World War II, despite the absence of some leading practitioners, and reveals that a surprising amount of salvage and research fieldwork took place. Fieldwork was primarily in the south of the country; it reflects pre-war investigative trends, contemporary knowledge, opinion of the archaeological resource, and the increased threat of war-related construction work, but also the impact of immediate post-war concerns such as housing and infrastructure. Although primarily undertaken by established excavators employed by the Ministry of Works, a substantial amount of rescue work was carried out by small groups, local societies, and individuals often outside State funding, which reflects an independent culture of fieldwork that continues to the present day.

Domestic livestock were a crucial part of Mediterranean communities throughout later prehistory. In the first millennium BC, livestock mangement changed, and was changed by, the rise of cities in Italy. Italian prehistory has a rich zooarchaeological tradition, but investigation of the Iron Age has been regionally divided and synthetic works on the Po valley comparatively few. This article presents a pan-regional review of late prehistoric and protohistoric livestock exploitation that considers Northern and Central Italy together for the first time. Zooarchaeological comparison reveals an increase in the use of sheep/goat for secondary products, while cattle and caprines were subject to size changes that distinguish their management from that of pigs. A marked increase in pig husbandry is visible in both regions, but this shift took place earlier and more emphatically in Northern Etruscan centres than in Central Italy. After defining the main changes in animal management during the period under review, this article looks beyond population density to explore the wider environmental, economic, and cultural context of pork consumption and its relation to the development of urbanism in Etruria padana.

Postmedieval protestant missionaries working in exotic locations used objects both as a marker of their own ‘civilisation’ in contrast to that of the local populations and as a means of engaging these communities with Christianity. European things were displayed and conspicuously used to encourage a consumer mindset and interest in capitalism, thought to be crucial steps on the path to full conversion. Excavations at a Presbyterian mission house on Tanna Island, Vanuatu, recovered a remarkable assemblage of nineteenth-century British-made transfer-printed ceramics for such a remote location. These objects reflect multiple, complex meanings including performance of a ‘civilised’ British identity, romanticized ideals of pastoral landscapes, and conceptions of death and rebirth in the afterlife. These meanings were complicated by the context of cross-cultural interactions that were necessary to the missionary project.