In recent years, scientific methods of bio- and geoarchaeology have become increasingly important for archaeological research. Political changes since the 1990s have reshaped the archaeological community. At the same time environmental topics have gained importance in modern society, but the debate lacks an historical understanding. Regarding medieval rural archaeology, we need to ask how this influences our archaeological research on medieval settlements, and how ecological approaches fit into the self-concept of medieval archaeology as a primarily historical discipline. Based mainly on a background in German medieval archaeology, this article calls attention to more complex ecological research questions. Medieval village formation and the late medieval crisis are taken as examples to sketch some hypotheses and research questions. The perspective of a village ecosystem helps bring together economic aspects, human ecology and environmental history. There are several implications for archaeological theory as well as for archaeological practice. Traditional approaches from landscape archaeology are insufficient to understand the changes within village ecosystems. We need to consider social aspects and subjective recognition of the environment by past humans as a crucial part of human–nature interaction. Use of the perspective of village ecosystems as a theoretical background offers a way to examine individual historical case studies with close attention to human agency. Thinking in terms of human ecology and environmental history raises awareness of some interrelations that are crucial to understanding past societies and cultural change.

Underwater archaeology took off from 1950 following the invention of the aqualung by two Frenchmen. In 1966, France became the first country with a specialized organization for underwater archaeology (DRASSM (Département des Recherches Archéologiques Subaquatiques et Sous-Marines)). The evolution of French law has provided strong protection for this heritage. Over the last 40 years, DRASSM has identified several thousands of wrecks and has managed the excavation of many of them. Currently, DRASSM has been given a new lease of life, with a service enhanced by young recruits, new buildings, and a technologically advanced research vessel.

This article critically explores the century-long history of research into a particular set of archaeological finds. The ‘princely graves’ – funerary assemblages dated to the early Iron Age (seventh to fifth centuries BC) containing, among other things, luxurious objects produced in Archaic Greek workshops – are known from various parts of temperate Europe, and were first recorded in the central Balkans region by the end of the nineteenth century. By their very nature, these finds pose several important theoretical and methodological problems, one of them being the need to bridge the divide between the procedures of prehistoric and classical archaeologies. The first attempts to account for these exceptional finds, in Europe as well as in the Balkans, were guided by the culture-historical procedure, typical of the archaeological investigation of the time. During the 1960s New Archaeology brought about the notion of chiefdom as a tool to account for the Iron Age societies. The concept was introduced into research on the central Balkan finds, proving successful in overcoming the shortcomings of the previous explanations, but at the same time creating new ones, encapsulated in the critique of the evolutionary approach. This review of research into the ‘princely graves’ concludes in proposing several new lines of inquiry, already introduced in the European archaeological theory: issues of group identity and individual actors, and phenomenological approaches to time and space.

This article discusses tenth–sixteenth-century pottery kilns in the Carpathian Basin in the territory of medieval Hungary. Kilns are classified on the basis of their structure, building technique and firing technology and these characteristics are examined using archaeological evidence, ethnographical sources and also technological and pyrotechnical analysis. The archaeological and stratigraphical features and some methodological problems of medieval pottery kiln study are also discussed and a topographical analysis of the pottery kilns in relation to the workshops and settlements on the basis of archaeological and historical evidence is presented. The history of the development, origin and distribution of the types of medieval pottery kilns in the Carpathian Basin is also presented. There is a brief discussion of the contribution that pottery kiln studies can make to the understanding of workshop organization.

Textile research has become an important field of archaeology. Although the established analytical methods are often viewed as specialized, their integration with other interdisciplinary approaches allows us to deal with broader archaeological issues and provides the interpretational base for a much more comprehensive investigation of textiles in ancient times. Analyses of fibres, dyes, archaeobotanical and archaeozoological remains, as well as palaeoenvironmental and geochemical investigations, provide information about available resources, while tool studies, experimental testing, and visual grouping are approaches that explore the technology and techniques. Together, these approaches can provide new knowledge about textile production and consumption and, thereby, about people and society in ancient times.

The aim of this paper is to locate in the emergence and elaboration of Sardinia's Nuragic society, a narrative of cultural identity formation. The Nuragic period is typically defined in terms of economic, social, and demographic characteristics, and a Nuragic identity is implicitly taken to be a passive byproduct of these material circumstances. Such an account overlooks the role of identity in enabling and characterizing human action. The disjointed and contradictory Nuragic period transition preceded the formation of a coherent cultural identity. This identity, it will be argued, underwent a retrospective rearticulation to establish a distinct boundary between the Nuragic society and its antecedents. The material record illustrates clearly that the history of the Nuragic identity is implicated in social development on Sardinia in the second millennium BC.

The article presents new results of stable isotope analyses made on animal and human bones from the Mesolithic–early Neolithic sites of Lepenski Vir and Vlasac in the Danube Gorges of the Balkans. It reconstructs the food web for the region during these periods on the basis of stable isotope analyses of mammal and fish species found at Vlasac. These results are compared to measurements made on human burials from the two sites. In the light of these new results, the article also discusses interpretations provided by previous isotopic studies of this material. It concludes that great care is required in the interpretation of stable isotope results due to inherent methodological complexities of this type of analysis, and suggests that it is also necessary to integrate stable isotope results with information based on the examination of faunal remains and the archaeological context of analysed burials when making inferences about palaeodietary patterns.

A new theoretical model is proposed for the definition of social structure and processes of change of the Castro Culture societies. It is based on current anthropological approaches to ‘agrarian segmentary societies’ and implies the revision of the aristocratic models that now dominate research on the European Iron Age.