Despite its importance, exploring prehistoric community formation presents significant epistemological and methodological challenges. In Korean archaeology, these issues have rarely been addressed primarily due to the longstanding dominance of the culture-historical paradigm. However, extensive archaeological investigations and the accumulation of radiocarbon dates in recent...
This article examines the articulation between archaeology and ideology in Nazi Germany, specifically the ideological content in archaeological narratives. We analyze German archaeology of this period in light of 19th century pan-Germanism and the German thinkers who helped shape the notion of a German national identity. Archaeology was utilized to strengthen Nazi ideology, with...
In this paper, I review archaeological evidence for shifting human–avian interactions. Many species of birds, altering their behavior in response to anthropogenic niche construction, experienced an increased encounter rate with humans. Intensification of this relationship led to management and domestication of some taxa. An examination of the methods zooarchaeologists employ to...
The Syrian oasis city Tadmor, better known as Palmyra, has received by far the most attention within scholarship on the Roman Near East over recent decades. New evidence and recent research allow us to better understand many aspects of Palmyra on its own terms, but it also has highlighted the lack of synthetically published data from Palmyra itself and from broader comparative...
Despite major advances in archaeological coverage of West Africa over the past several decades, interpretations remain hampered by the analytical bifurcation of the region’s past into northern (active) and southern (reactive) economic and political trajectories. Building on the expanding corpus of scholarship, I argue that northern origins models centering the arid zones have...
Silver exchanged by weight for its intrinsic value was the most important measure of value and means of payment in the southern Levant, starting from the Middle Bronze Age II–III through the Iron Age (~1700/1650‒600 BC). Since silver is not available locally in the Levant, its ongoing use as currency in the region triggered long-distance trade initiatives, and its availability or...
The study of collapse in archaeology and history has continued to grow and develop in the last decade and is a respectable target of investigation in and beyond these fields. Environmental determinism and apocalyptic narratives have become less acceptable and collapsology has matured into a more nuanced, self-critical, and sophisticated field. This review explores recent work on...
The processes of long-term urbanization in southern Mesopotamia are still insufficiently investigated, even though recent studies using large datasets and focusing on neighboring regions have paved the way to understanding the critical role of multiple variables in the shaping of settlement strategies by ancient human societies, among which climate change played an important role...
Perspectives on human–animal relationships are changing in archaeology and related disciplines. Analytical models that distinguish foraging from food production remain popular, but scholars are beginning to recognize greater variability in the ways people understood and engaged with animals in the past. In southern Africa, researchers have observed that wild animals were...
Since the 19th century, the study of shell middens has played an important role in archaeological research. Shell midden and broader coastal archaeology have transformed our understanding of human relationships with aquatic habitats, demonstrating the importance of marine environments to human evolution and ecology, the colonization of islands and establishment of maritime trade...
Aquaculture is the world’s fastest growing food sector and accounts for more than 50% of the world’s fish food supply. The significant growth in global aquaculture since the middle of the 20th century has been dubbed by the Blue Revolution. However, it is not the first Blue Revolution to take place in human history. While historically classified as low-ranking, seasonal, or...
Niche construction theory has played a prominent role in archaeology during the last decade. However, the potential of niche construction in relation to agricultural development has received less attention. To this end, we bring together literature on the forms and sources of agronomic variability and use a series of examples to highlight the importance of reciprocal causation...
Island archaeology is a well-established field within the wider discipline, but African contributions to it remain scarce. The Canary Islands are unusual in the broader African context for their relatively long history of occupation (~2000 years) and the intensity with which archaeological research has been, and is, undertaken there. Much of that research, however, has focused on...
Pre-Columbian food production in the Maya Lowlands was long characterized as reliant on extensive, slash-and-burn agriculture as the sole cultivation system possible in the region, given environmental limitations, with maize as the dominant crop. While aspects of this “swidden thesis” of Maya agriculture have been chipped away in recent years, there has been an underappreciation...
We focus on pre-Columbian agricultural regimes in the Maya Lowlands, using new datasets of archaeological wood charcoal, seeds, phytoliths, and starch grains; biological properties of plants; and contemporary Indigenous practices. We address inherited models of agriculture in the lowlands: the limitations of the environment (finding more affordances than anticipated by earlier...
Animal domestication is a profound change for human societies, economies, and worldviews. The shifting definitions of animal domestication reflect its varying and process-like nature. Reindeer is one of the species whose domestication is not easily pinned down using standard definitions and research methodologies of animal domestication. In recent years, advances in...
The globalizing connections that defined the European Bronze Age in the second millennium BC either ended or abruptly changed in the decades around 1200 BC. The impact of climate change at 3.2 ka on such social changes has been debated for the eastern Mediterranean. This paper extends this enquiry of shifting human–climate relationships during the later Bronze Age into Europe for...
The Etruscans, who dominated central Italy for much of the first half of the first millennium BC, are ripe for new analysis: the quantity of data for their culture is now substantial, wide ranging, and qualifies for large-scale comparison. In this paper, we survey how research in the last decade has affected our understanding of settlements, of changing models of the transfer of...
The Late Bronze Age (1700–900 BC) represents an extremely dynamic period for Mediterranean Europe. Here, we provide a comparative survey of the archaeological record of over half a millennium within the entire northern littoral of the Mediterranean, from Greece to Iberia, incorporating archaeological, archaeometric, and bioarchaeological evidence. The picture that emerges, while...
This paper reviews the achievements and challenges of archaeological research on Viking Age northern Europe and explores potential avenues for future research. We identify the reemergence of comparative and cross-cultural perspectives along with a turn toward studying mobility and maritime expansion, fueled by the introduction of biomolecular and isotopic data. The study of...
This work re-approaches the origins of “the Celts” by detailing the character of their society and the nature of social change in Europe across 700–300 BC. A new approach integrates regional burial archaeology with contemporary classical texts to further refine our social understanding of the European Iron Age. Those known to us as “Celts” were matrifocal Early Iron Age groups in...
In the original publication it was erroneously stated that the Y-chromosome haplogroup Q1a2 was found in Yamnaya burials, and that R1a was found in Majkop graves. The respective haplogroups were not found in either set of interments.
Recent excavations and theoretical advances have revealed evidence of an early and perhaps independent nucleation and centralization process in the region south of the Alps, a phenomenon that has been undervalued in previous studies. In this paper I present a broad overview and attempt to reassess the role of the Cisalpine regions as crossroads of trade and cultural transfer...
There has been a great increase in archaeological research in Mongolia since 2000. Increasingly precise chronologies, regional studies, and the growth of development-driven archaeology are transforming our knowledge of this key region of northeastern Asia. This review summarizes recent work and provides a narrative of the prehistoric and medieval cultural sequences as presently...
This paper discusses and synthesizes the consequences of the archaeogenetic revolution to our understanding of mobility and social change during the Neolithic period in Europe (6500–2000 BC). In spite of major obstacles to a productive integration of archaeological and anthropological knowledge with ancient DNA data, larger changes in the European gene pool are detected and taken...