The circulation of bronze is considered to be the principal vehicle of social reproduction for the later Bronze Age, with significant social investment in trade networks, systems of exchange, and social alliances. Substantial social upheaval is implied by the decline of bronze, as attested by the widespread deposition of hoards towards the end of this period. This article aims to fill a lacuna between the period of peak bronze hoarding and other vectors of change such as the manipulation of grain surpluses or the creation of hillforts. The reorganization of the Wiltshire landscape signifies transformation to a transhumant regime. Animals became increasingly important at the end of the Bronze Age, with daily life revolving around their management, dictating seasonal movement, and interaction. Investment in the social value of animals beyond pure subsistence requirements was a major factor filling the social gap left by the demise of bronze. This was accompanied by changes in the mode of production and the scales of social engagement.

The balloon has long drifted through popular discourse as a symbol of an Enlightenment attitude towards discovery and a Romanticized image of rationality. This article uses two accounts of early British balloon voyages, both published in 1786, and through them attempts to understand the wide range of practices – literary, social, chemical and adventurous – employed by early balloonists in Britain. I argue that the two series of flights recorded by John Jeffries and Vincenzo Lunardi can be read to show two different philosophical ideas of and aspirations for ballooning, each of which is tied to a different British location, and established a different paradigm for the public reception of flight experiments in later years.

A municipal boundary dispute between Dublin's nationalist city council and its independent unionist suburbs in the early twentieth century was symptomatic of a much deeper disagreement over national identity within the United Kingdom. Considering urban councils as the link between the state and local civil society (or subscriber democracy), and using theories proposed by Graeme Morton, R.J. Morris and Norton E. Long, along with illustrative contrasts from municipal behaviour in Edinburgh, this article examines these relationships in Edwardian Dublin. It argues that the modernization of Irish municipal government in 1898 empowered Dublin in unforeseen ways. By amplifying existing divergent identities, and providing a platform for the nascent Irish state, municipal government reforms contributed significantly to the break-up of the UK in 1922.

The Adriatic Sea and Balkan Peninsula were an important corridor for the spread of agriculture northwards and westwards from the Near East into Europe. Therefore, the pace and nature of the Mesolithic-Neolithic transition along the Adriatic coastline has important implications for the movement of new peoples and/or ideas during one of the most eventful periods in European prehistory. We present new Early Neolithic radiocarbon and stable isotope evidence from humans and animals from the Zemunica cave site in Dalmatia, Croatia. The results show that these humans date to the earliest Neolithic in the region, and they have completely terrestrial diets, where the main protein source was most likely to have come from domesticated animals. Data are then compared to previous isotope and archaeological evidence to explore models for the spread of agriculture along the eastern Adriatic coast.

Italian neorealism is conventionally read as the authoritative cinematic chronicle of Italy’s experience of the Second World War and the Resistance. However, this article argues that viewing this period of Italian cinema solely through the lens of neorealism has obscured the importance of the affective charge of melodrama in constituting an alternative ethics of representation in the late 1940s and early 1950s in Italy, one that worked via an appeal to the emotions. It posits that the traumas of Fascism, war, occupation, and Resistance were worked through by Italian cinema after the war in a range of genres and modes, principally melodrama.

By focusing on the figure of the returning soldier or reduce, and the films’ representation of a return to domestic disruption, the article examines how this domestic or romantic disruption stands in for what cannot be narrated, which is the ideological chaos of the Fascist and post-Fascist period. The article argues that the disturbance caused by the reduce to familial relations speaks to the Italian struggle to come to terms with aspects of its repressed war experience, particularly that of the Italian soldiers imprisoned abroad.

The discovery of a remarkable group of vividly coloured rounded cobbles in the fields and monuments of the later medieval outports of Bruges has initiated a multi-disciplinary investigation into their function, provenance, and wider economic meaning. Geological analyses demonstrate that the stones are ballast of exotic lithological nature. A substantial number consist of glacial erratics collected from cobble beaches in the Baltoscandian area. Another group can be traced to north-eastern British coasts. The clustering of stones at Hoeke has drawn particular attention to the Hanseatic connection with Bruges and to the small harbour town of Hoeke, which hosted the staple of stockfish and various other Hanseatic activities. This article contributes to the discussion of ballast stones as a meaningful archaeological object category, especially when studied in a broader methodological context including archaeological, geological, and historical research.