Between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries AD, the Lower Vistula valley represented a permeable and shifting frontier between Pomerelia (eastern Pomerania), which had been incorporated into the Polish Christian state by the end of the tenth century, and the territories of western Prussian tribes, who had resisted attempts at Christianization. Pomeranian colonization eventually began to falter in the latter decades of the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, most likely as a result of Prussian incursions, which saw the abandonment of sites across the borderland. Subsequently, the Teutonic Order and its allies led a protracted holy war against the Prussian tribes, which resulted in the conquest of the region and its incorporation into a theocratic state by the end of the thirteenth century. This was accompanied by a second wave of colonization, which resulted in the settlement pattern that is still visible in the landscape of north-central Poland today. However, not all colonies were destroyed or abandoned in between the two phases of colonization. The recently excavated site of Biała Góra, situated on the western side of the Forest of Sztum overlooking the River Nogat, represents a unique example of a transitional settlement that included both Pomeranian and Teutonic Order phases. The aim of this paper is to situate the site within its broader landscape context which can be characterized as a militarized frontier, where, from the later twelfth century and throughout much of the thirteenth century, political and economic expansion was combined with the ideology of Christian holy war and missionary activity. This paper considers how the colonists provisioned and sustained themselves in comparison to other sites within the region, and how Biała Góra may be tentatively linked to a documented but otherwise lost outpost in this volatile borderland.

The process of the production of copper and bronze is presented in this paper as a sequential operation. Each stage of this process may influence the final product. The deconstruction of the process is a convenient way of examining each individual stage, using archaeological case studies from different places within the Old World and, where useful, ethnographic studies. The examination will focus on two aspects: innovation and specialization. It seeks to move beyond technological determinism by relating the study of technology to the context of those societies which shaped and practised it and which exercised certain choices in its execution.

Animals from distant lands fired the imaginations of people living in Europe throughout the Middle Ages. This is attested by a considerable wealth of iconographic and written material which has been explored from many perspectives, providing valuable insights into medieval western conceptualizations of the fringes of the known world and the otherness of exotica. However, the physical remains of non-indigenous species – both those recovered from archaeological contexts and extant in private collections – have generally been examined in isolation and rarely incorporated into a broader framework exploring the reception and utility of exotica. This article offers a new perspective on the topic by focusing on the zoological identity of non-indigenous animal body parts as ‘material culture’.

The Underwater Archaeology Centre of Andalusia opened in 1997 due to the need to correctly manage and preserve the underwater archaeological heritage of Andalusia; the main goal set was protection. Aware that the protection of this heritage necessarily involved global knowledge thereof, the Centre decided to focus its efforts on executing a core project – an archaeological map – a tool that would enable the establishment of specific protection and preservation mechanisms and the design of research strategies. The results obtained from this project have enabled the achievement in recent years of some of the goals set, notably guaranteeing the legal protection of these space, and drawing up projects with specific research targets.

This article proposes an alternative way to explore a series of definitions, concepts, meanings and, sometimes, polysemies of island worlds, by using mainly ancient Greek literary sources, diachronic island names, and their etymologies, epithets, and other systems of labelling and describing them. It argues that such evidence literally and metaphorically involves mirrors and maps, and transcribes important parameters of an eloquent cognitive geography, forged from long-established knowledge and empirical wisdom, and relevant to modern scientific insights, including archaeological ones. If systematically investigated and thoroughly deciphered, this may disclose numerous meaningful elements of the insular topoi we study; and thus enrich significantly our efforts to conceive them as ‘total’ natural and cultural geographies – or ‘insularities’ – through time. Here, a limited number of cited examples illustrate a few, and mainly physical, aspects of their morphological, geological, topographic and other environmental traits – only tentatively touching upon their human-made landscapes. All the same, the information this provides may be also relevant, even if indirectly, to the islands' cultural environments. Furthermore, this approach can certainly be expanded to cover various other general and specific insular properties – including their inhabitants and diachronic monuments.

This paper draws attention to the fact that east-central Sweden consisted of an extensive archipelago throughout the Stone Age. An image of the Mesolithic cultural landscape is beginning to take shape, since a large number of sites have been found and excavated in recent years. The remains of the sub-regions on the mainland and at the inner margin of the archipelago are interpreted as reflecting changes in material culture without any corresponding change further out. In considering why people of some sub-regions were more susceptible to new ideas than those of others, the specific physical setting and the strong social order prevailing in fishing and seal-hunting communities are regarded as factors which prevent rapid changes.

Despite recent emphasis on the impact of nationalism on archaeology, the discussion has centered more on the ideological framework of the culture-historical school of archaeology, particularly on the concept of archaeological culture. Comparatively little attention has been paid to how archaeologists contributed to the construction of the national past. This article examines Slavic archaeology, a discipline crisscrossing national divisions of archaeological schools, within the broader context of the ‘politics of culture’ which characterizes all nation-states, as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 1991). Indeed, the current academic discourse about the early Slavs in Ukraine, Russia, and Romania appears as strikingly tied to political, rather than intellectual, considerations. In eastern Europe, the concept of archaeological culture is still defined in monothetic terms on the basis of the presence or absence of a list of traits or types derived from typical sites or intuitively considered to be representative cultural attributes. Archaeologists thus regarded archaeological cultures as actors on the historical stage, playing the role individuals or groups have in documentary history. Archaeological cultures became ethnic groups, and were used to legitimize claims of modern nation-states to territory and influence.

With the commemoration of World War I (WWI) under way, a preliminary stocktaking can be made of archaeological research into the physical remains of this war. The question is to what extent the perspective on the study of WWI heritage, and consequently the way in which archaeological research into WWI remains has been conducted, has evolved over the last ten years. Are relics from WWI seen as a legitimate subject of inquiry or does its archaeology as a discipline still strive for recognition? This paper deals with the practices surrounding WWI archaeology in Flanders, Belgium, as well as the (methodological) problems concerning the study of WWI archaeological remains, based on the reports resulting from fieldwork carried out by professional archaeologists.

Cutmarks on the bones of ten individuals from Körtik Tepe, a Pre-Pottery Neolithic site in Southeastern Anatolia, were analysed using a bioarchaeological approach. Half of the ten individuals possess cutmarks on their crania only while the other five have cutmarks on both their cranial and postcranial bones. Diagnoses of these cutmarks suggest they were made on fresh cadavers, while skeletal data and burial customs reveal that the individuals with cutmarks were subject to human intervention in the decomposition process, understood as post-burial practices rather than secondary burials. This conclusion is supported by the application of plaster and paint as part of the burial customs. The process of defleshing is interpreted as an attempt to purify the corpse and to separate death from life.

Epitaphs inscribed on stone record biographical information about the deceased, and in certain cases, the age at death. However, it has been demonstrated that these ages on Roman epitaphs are not an accurate reflection of the demographics of death, but are subject to cultural bias. Using the idea of the ‘life course’, this article explores these cultural biases and their relationship to age and gender structures. Material from Italy suggests that these are tied into ideologies of gender, with adulthood defined by the transition to magistrate for men and wife for women. Material from other areas demonstrates different patterns, and in the case of Etruria, these are shown to be a negotiation between pre-Roman and Romanized customs. The phenomenon of ‘age-rounding’ is also argued to be part of these ideas of correct age.